If Alan or anyone else who could help comes across this post, I'm having a bit of trouble deciding how to render a good looking sky backdrop. The images of the scene are below. The problem at the moment is the resolution of the texture, which would have to be huge to not look low-quality in the animation, meaning quite a long render time. The scene begins with the camera panning down from the moon, so the sky is in the focus quite a lot.
The other option I considered was removing the backdrop in Maya and adding it on After Effects, which would take less time to render, but surely I'd have to export my Maya camera into AE to get the motion on the backdrop. I've experimented with the Paint Effects nightsky, but I think that would be overkill for the simple shot.
Simple answer - You need to invest in some high res images.
However, two factors...
1) The size of your scene in Maya. Keep it reasonable.
2) If you measure the output resolution of your render (ie 1080 etc) and compare it to your original texture it helps to guage quality.
Ok, Thanks Alan!
I'll create a larger resolution image, I'm trying to keep the scene down by using a painted forest backdrop and keeping the camera lower to the ground, The render time is OK so far, hopefully with the sky it will stay that way