reflection on mesh parts

[seraglio]

I keep running into the same challenge when adding reflection to a mesh model, hopefully I'm doing something wrong that vets can help me figure out.

The scenario is usually an older mesh with no reflection. I go through the steps to add reflect/glow/lights to the main mesh and everything is fine. However if the mesh has other pieces, they are suddenly glowing and reflective. However, going through the exact same process to add reflect and glow doesn't always work. The piece always has full reflection, it completely ignores reflect and glow maps assigned to it. Blacking out the main lightmap will remove the gloss. If I add a copy of the piece, even an exact copy from a working model, complete with working textures, the newly added piece has the same problem inherited from parent node.

If someone wants to replicate the problem , right now I'm working with the Gunwitch mesh. I think I added refl to this long ago, maybe it was already there. The model has pistols and revolvers (railgun), same as the PV_versatile meshes. The pistols were skinned and mapped, but the revolvers were not. I added the skin from the PV meshes and created refl/glow maps as always, but the revolvers will not acknowledge them. They now use the right base skin (railgun.tga), but ignore the refl and glow I created. Normally I would blame an older or faulty mesh, but I think this one is derived from Texas jacks self named mesh, which I've never had problems with and wouldn't consider that old. There are no misspellings, caps, reversed nisourcetexture references, nitexturing properties set wrong,those sorts of common errors, etc. This is something different, I do it all the time and 90% of the time it works....