Painting the View: Flat Backgrounds! (Patreon)

One of the biggest rendering shortcuts I tried here was basically faking most of the room.

Rendering Madelyn’s entire manor interior every frame would have added a lot of unnecessary render time, especially when most of it is just sitting in the background. Since I’m trying to cut down on cloud-rendering costs and move more of the workload back onto my own PC, I wanted to see how much of the environment I could simplify without it being noticeable.

So I rendered the manor once from the animation camera’s exact point of view, then projected that finished image onto a flat plane and lined it up with the camera. That meant I could keep the exact same background composition and lighting without having Maya calculate the full room, furniture, bookshelves, curtains, trim, and everything else behind Madelyn on every frame.

It’s a very simple trick, but it made a huge difference to render times. As long as the camera angle stays locked and nothing needs to interact with the background, the result is basically the same visually for a fraction of the cost.