Dense urban areas

[PapaXpress]

The areas I am working on have a lot of homes, and trees. From the top down you can see it all, but say you hike up Mission Peak (local mini-mountain around here) and look at the Bay Area you generally see the trees and not the tops of houses.

So two questions really. The first is how far from the track should I keep on placing objects? At a certain point from the track they will not be seen, and can only be viewed from above, so should I care? My second question is, is there a quick (since there are a gazillion houses) way to place four or five city's worth of houses? I was almost thinking that I should make a decal of just the roofs and then elevate it off the ground about 20', but I am worried that, that many decals would be too heavy in comparison to drawn objects.

OK, a third question. If I need to make my own objects, is there an easy (like I have no idea how to do this, and even less time) way to make simple houses (probably just roofs) using freeware software?

[kin3]

I make my route using cab view. What the engineer sees is what I put down. I use less complex houses the further away from the track. Some like to detail out a little further so it's your call. To many decals can cause problem I believe.

[imnew]

I second Mr Kinnie here. Im building my NS route using cab view mode, with some minor extra scenery on the "sides". Railfanning trackside is great as long as i dont stray too far from the tracks.

[Trainguy76]

Hiya, I build my routes where one- one half of an adjacent tile is full of scenery, and then continue on.

[PapaXpress]

Thanks for the feedback. I like the 1 1/2 idea. I guess I can always add more detail as needed.

[SMMDigital]

This is another one of those "to each his own" kind of things. For me, if it's flat terrain, I like a "tracks" tile, and one on each side to be filled with scenery, with the higher details nearest the tracks and low detail (i.e. Lots of trees) in the adjacent tiles. In the mountains I just fill in to the top of the ridge nearest the tracks. The drawback to this though is that i'm only making progress of about 3/4 of a mile a week. I suppose that will be ok though if RSC sticks around a while. :)

[PapaXpress]

I hear ya. I have about @2 hours a night (and less if I want to run trains ) with about 5 days a week to work on this. I already prepared myself that this will take a lot of time, but I didn't want to make it impossible.