The far mountains were created as a matte painting created by Carlos Amato. You can find a detailed description of his process in his research report on the production website. This painting was photographed, stitched together in Photoshop to create a long, narrow, image and then colour-corrected and projected onto a cylinder that surrounded the scene in Maya. The matte was rendered as a seperate layer using a basic surface shader and then heavily treated in post-production to get the final look.

The sky was also a painting created by Thulani Simantov. It was mapped onto a dome that covered the environment scene and rendered in a similar fashion to the mountains..