A slow start - Asset selection - TREES AAAH!

Being stuck at Bowery isn't exactly a bad thing, I really love looking at what i've done so far.. I'm sorry if i'm blowing my own trumpet but compared to how it used to look i'm extremely happy with what i've achieved so far.. It restores my faith in Trainz being able to be somewhat immersive and realistic.

The reason i'm stuck at Bowery is its where i've started. Simple.
Let me explain.. Starting is hard, you have no idea what assets you're using and you can't go look at a previous area to get ideas or copy and paste tree formations..

This is the annoying part..
I've narrowed down some textures I am using, a few are default textures i've attempted to upgrade by making them higher detail. The horrid part of routebuilding which i'm sure most will agree on is TREES + FOLIAGE!!

Yes trees..
Luckly Trainz has had a sortof Tree Messiah. In the name of Pofig, a Russian creator, he has made literately hundreds of trees and foliage. Problem is there is so much.

I call this the palette board. Obvious why. (You can't even see all the trees
Trainz removes them from sight because there are too many!)

One way of dealing with this which I have used previously is to build a baseboard containing many assets, in this case its filled up with Pofig's trees. 100s of them. I can then get an overview of the trees and use it as a palette much like an artist would have.. I can grab trees and place them into areas, even make little set pieces using a variety, for example a hedgerow created from a few trees and bushes.

I'm even going to go so far as to have a separate board for these set pieces which will be a palette of set pieces I can copy and paste around the route.

At the moment I'm at the hard part of choosing the trees I want to use, obviously I don't want to keep this palette and end up with 1000s of different trees on my route causing performance mayhem as Trainz has to load many types and people are forced to download 1000s of dependencies to run this route.

I want to narrow them down to select few! But how?

Yep, this is the same board as previous shots, there are more than you can
see, you see?

Well at the moment I'm looking around the internet at lovely photos of UK countryside (mostly photos of railways so I'm not too bored).. So I can find trees that match the UK native trees on my tree (palette) board.

You can see what I mean about it being a slow start.. Once i've completed the Bowery area and a board or two in either direction i'll know what i'm going for so on from there progress will be much quicker as generally the UK countryside has the same type of trees and things grow in similiar ways.. Its not like my route is going from Essex to Scotland in the space of a board.. Then i'd have to change my methods!