Cards

I had a play with alpha cards. The distant mountains, the trees and the cloaked figure are not models; they're images rendered on a plane or on simple "cards", then placed in the scene and aligned with the camera. Doing this using a compositor is a lot more powerful, but this is a quick way to optimise resource-intensive renders. Blender 4.5 Beta, True Terrain 5, True-Sky, Photographer 5. The weird bronze statue with the tentacles was generated using Spark3D.

Key elements are not geometry; they're images projected onto planes or simple card models.