Is ther a siple way of choosing the right ballast for a given track? I find plowing through the list of several choices not intuative as there are many in the list that look about right in colour but when used are either to light or to dark.
I find that a few content creators who have made track also make matching ballast textures. If you search that user's assets, you may find what you're after. It won't always work but it's worth a try.
The issue was for many years was that the rendering engine would render the same texture differently on objects versus how it rendered as a ground texture. I used to grab the texture from the track and turn it into a ground texture but it always required a lot of tweaking to get near to a match.
Yea, the same texture looks different between model and ground. Maybe when the new HD ground is released it will help blend the two together better. I'm hoping it will help tunnel portals to blend in better with the surrounding land.