How do I make realistic backgrounds?

While working on routes, i always fall into the same problem: my backgrounds look terrible. I always end up putting huge mountains all around the layout, but that looks so unrealistic. How do I make my backgrounds look real?

You probably don't have to make huge mountains, just hills taller than the cab view. I think that is the way most people work, or forest it heavy enough that the edges get lost when viewed from the tracks. People have uploaded backgrounds you can place along your route, but to me they make it look more like a model railroad with photo backgrounds.

It's all about being subtle. Mother Nature is subtle in many ways yet big and bold in others. Most things outside of the stark huge mountain ranges are subtle and a lot of little things go a long way. A thick forest to hide the edge, a cityscape, which doesn't need to be a full city and only enough to hide a return loop or portal, or rolling hills to bring the height up just enough to immerse the driver so everything appears bigger than it really isn't.

What helps with this is getting down to the track-level and looking around.

Trainz isn't much different in many ways than a real model railroad or movie set. If you think in those terms, you can do a lot with it.

Place a large hill, about 20 grid squares deep, and use some of the hedge splines placed about 4 grid squares apart along the side of the hill. It gives a 3D effect when seen from the side or at the train level.

Unless its a large yard, town or port area most of my current route which equates to about 100 miles long by some 30 miles wide is no more than two baseboards wide. I start by using the terrain slope tool to create a gentle slope from the centre of the two boards out to the edges effectively creating a long trough down the centre, rising to perhaps 70-80 units high at the edges to containing the scenery. I them meander the track down the centre of the boards raised 10-15 units which enable me to contour the terrain around the track both below and above this artificial track level. I then include platforms for any stations, roads and rivers/water and associated bridges. Then start the detailed work, working on between 5-10 baseboard length of route at one time. Include buildings, fences/hedges etc, textures, grass, trees and so forth and populating the stations as I get to them. As more assets are introduced the terrain can be further developed to accommodate them but remember detail gets less the further away from the track the scenery is. As in the real world the flatter the terrain the further you and see but equally fields become larger, hedges and roads straighter and longer, and unless its a built up area generally the infrastructure is more sparse and equally more difficult to see due to the nature that anything close to the track shield what is behind it and so on. In hilly terrain a best you can generally see is partly round the hill in front of you but seldom over it so why build much further than you can actually see unless you are going to include flying aircraft which perhaps is a much larger challenge from a scenery perspective. Peter

One way to make realistic backgrounds is to use TrainzDEM. I use Google Maps or Google Earth to search the world for interesting terrain. Most people use TrainzDEM to make the terrain for the route itself, but you can also use it to make interesting and realistic background terrain on a new route, and then merge the new route into your existing route. For example, I have created a route in TrainzDEM to create a volcano (island volcanos work best, and select 10m not 5m) and then merge the volcano route into a realistic spot such as just offshore. You can get realistic backgrounds for not much effort.