This rant is about as pointless as some of the routes you describe. Why not try to learn how to build your own route so you can build some of your own routes to run on? The only thing that limits what you can do is your imagination. I got some tips I can share with you as well.. While texturing, I prefer to hold down the [ or ] keys. What that does is take out some of the tiling of the ground textures. In some cases, you can mix textures together, its pretty easy really, it works for dirt textures. I'm not sure on gravel though. All you do is paint the ground with one dirt texture. That will be your base. Next, you pull out a second texture, then turn the radius all the way down (or like me, where 1 dot is still lit) and remembering to use the [ or ] keys to keep the tiling effect away, you just start randomly clicking. Try not to hold the mouse clicker down!!! (I've done that, it really sucks lol). You can do that for just about any texture, rock faces, grass, dirt, meadows, you name the texture, you can probably do it. If you add some grass, I would tell you to use the grass splines by tram__ off the DLS. They're great for almost any situation, plus they look awesome on embankments. You can mix those as well. All you do, is once again, lay one or two or more out side by side (Try to make them touch each other). This will be your base. You pick another grass spline, and hold down the shift key (This allows you to put splines inside another spline easier than it would if you didn't.) and then layout the next spline, try not to make them side-by-side. If you can, you'll want to kinda criss-cross them. You can possibly add a third one if it is fitting. The third one you do the same thing as the second one, only you can lay them out side-by-side again. For trees, I like to mix it up a little. You'll see that I sometimes use a mix of 3D and 2D trees (I use the CL trees off the DLS by clam1952 or pofig trees from millions of different packs in the 3rd party world.). For trees, a critical thing is keeping the repetition out. To do this, (I know this sound stupid), randomly create an area of a bunch of tree variants at different heights and different rotations. (If you want to make this faster, turn on randomly rotate objects in surveyor) Once done with that step, use the copy and paste tool to place the same area of trees faster. Since you created the random area of random trees, the tree groups will look less unified than if you did it yourself by hand. How about this, want a bigger city faster? Create a few city blocks, then copy and paste each block and randomly place them trying as hard as you can not to place a similar block to another similar block. For abandonment looking areas or some larger expanses that aren't maintained so well, I use some ultra-weeds. Since most people including myself visualize an abandoned or non-maintained area having weeds growing upon it, I naturally do it. Try to use a mixture of different weeds, copy and paste will also work for that. For old rickety track that isn't used or maintained that often, try to put some grass growing up through it. People's eyes will pop out on it. For mountains, most people think of them always being rocky and jagged, so they paint them in a rock texture. This is not always the case (Trust me, I live in an area where the mountains are covered in the same grass color as the valley.) You'll want to check with the area at which you're making to see if this is the case. Also if you're doing a general area that kinda has a large expanse of nothing, maybe a random farm/field will look great. That takes out some of blankness of parts of routes that don't have a lot in them. For creating terrain, I like to get a little advanced. I turn the radius up to the max, and the sensitivity down in between 1 dot lit and 2 dots lit. What this does, is cause the mountains/hills to be less steep. WARNING: It can sometimes take an eternity to make a decent looking mountain range. Always remember that the key to any of this, is your imagination, it will never look right if you don't interject a little bit of you in there. Everything starts with an idea first.
