I make the ground in paintshop 9 with the mask and all that stuff. I make the map in 3ds max 7 I input the ground.tiff file in it I appil a uvw mapping to it then I unrap uvw map edit it do all the stuff to make it look good, then link it to the frame export it and go into tool. I do everything i need to in tool turn the ground.tiff into a bitmap do all I need to do all I need to do for the map to work then build the structure then go into sapein. this is where it messes up. the level and the sky is there but no ground sometime the grounds there but its all messed up and to dark to see. I just ignore it and do the radiosity_quality 0 only once it worked and started counting down but the map was to big so I had to stop it because it was taking to long

For the ground in the shader_environment tag does it want the bitmap or the .tiff file?