In terms of suggesting efficient ways I'm probably not the guy to ask as I'm a bit of a n00b at all this however I can give you a quick runthough of the workflow.

-Design track layout in the in game editor.

-Export to obj and import in 3D CAD software i.e. Blender / 3DS Max

-Start generating basic terrain and buildings around the track (usually by extruding from the edges of the track walls). Ideally you want to set up as much as you can in quads, polygons next to the track want to be about the same length as a single segment of track as it makes it easy to keep the texture resolution looking consistant between track and scenery. Those that are away from the track can be larger.

-Apply textures to scenery (You will probably want to set up a texture atlas at this point although it is possible to get away with using multiple materials) and deal with all the UV mapping.


-Once you've done this it might be wise to import it into the game to see how it looks from a player's perspective, that way you can iron out any issues such as unintended blind corners or intended views which have been clipped out due to limited draw distance. Then when you're happy with this you can go back and add in the minor details.

One thing to note about importing scenery is that you need to ensure that the track walls, floor and tunnels are not exported as part of the scenery mesh. Instead you will need to go back to the in game editor and export a trm file for the floor and walls which will be then used when you import into unity. For tunnels you simply import the obj that you exported initially, you can fiddle with the UV mapping on these if you want to use multiple textures.



As far as sourcing out textures they can come from wherever you like. I don't have any particularly good sources myself tbh, a lot of mine come from google searches and in a few cases they are simply ripped from other games and modified to fit with the rest of the scene. Texture alignment pretty much takes care of itself if your scenery is extruded from the track walls as I mentioned earlier.




I hope this is helpful in some way. If you have any further questions I will attempt to answer them but please bear in mind that my technical knowledge on the subject is very limited.

Thank you! :) This is very helpful. I'm toying around with track layouts and will upload a couple scenery-less track designs to collect feedback, then will have free time in a month or two to do the scenery.

Textures: Can't I just get the textures from the vanilla tracks? :/ I was hoping I could do that, modify them and reimport them. I am capable of making my own, but would prefer visual consistency. -ahem Marina Rush-

Also, while your tracks don't have animated billboards, do you know how to make them?

Cool, I look forward to seeing some of that.

The track textures from the vanilla tracks are provided with the unity tools but the actual scenery textures are not unfortunately. Whether or not the devs will decide to include them later on down the line I'm not sure.

I haven't looked into doing animated billboards myself yet so atm I'm not sure how to go about doing it but I know for certain that it can be done.