Some beginner skinner questions.Colorful shadows,etc...

[I.R.Brainiac]

Hello all...
I am an old windowblinds skinner that is now trying my skills at car skins.
Mostly everything is going well.Car looks good.

Problem 1...Colorful shadows in CSP are not working on my car.They do work on Kunos cars.The Mazda cup car has a green banner and it has green lighting in the cockpit when light shines through the windshield banner.

My banner is applied to the int glass directly and looks fine.(though the image also shows up on the rear glass because of the way the UVs are wrapped)(sigh).
I noticed Kunos cars have a seperate mesh for their banners with the windshield being another mesh right below the banner.
My car(Mazda RX-7 spirit R) just has the int glass mesh.I get zero colorful shadows.

Problem 2...I put 2 banners on the outside glass and the showed up fine but were very dark once you were on the track.In showroom they looked fine.I did fiddle with the windshield materials properties and they brightened up some.In the showroom however they

are almost glowing now.Way brighter than on track.(this same difference in looks happens on other Kunos cars as well so its not just this car)

Problem 3...I made a texture for the back of the seats and saved it as dds.In LOD 0 it looks good.But as you car drives further away it reverts to the original texture.I thought when you saved from PS as dds it created the mipmaps for the descending LODs?
It looks so bad seeing the completely different color textures pop in and out.(the lighting changes too but I guess thats just a LOD distance thing with the shadows or something...its awful)(I already cranked the LODs to 320 in CSP...still see them brightness changes)

Sorry for the long dump,please help,I am in a stump.
Thank you from I.R.Brainiac

 

[I.R.Brainiac]

Its lonely in here all by myself.
I was wrong about fiddling with the window materials making the window banner brighter.I did a file integrity check and it reset my changes.So I guess that means my fiddling fix was only temporary.Now the stickers on the glass are dark again and I am completely at a loss as to how to fix them.The inside ones display perfectly,why wont the outside ones?
Still cant get the colorful shadows to work either.Nor the cockpit shadows LOD pop.
I am 90 percent done and I cant move forward.Spending more time googling than skinning or racing.

Are these issues something I could fix with extension ini?(just started seeing references to these)
Any good sources for learning ANY of this stuff?
Thank you...

 

[I.R.Brainiac]

I also cant get metalflake to work on the rims.They got colored correctly but no flakes.(tried both noise in the alpha and using metal detail)