that’s a nice mountain. Would look good for a sprite cutout. I think its more better to just drag the detailed mountain out into the engine and texture it, then after its spent an hour building all the lighting and so take a snapshot pic of it and save it and load it in the gimp, cut out the mountain, and then import it as a paper sprite so you can just use the cutout of the mountain to to build your distant 3d mountains ranges with. You don’t need to have real 3d mountains in the level that take up millions and millions of polys unless you’re insane. but I do think its a good idea to drag a mountain terrain in the engine and texture it all so you can prepare some nice paper sprites for your project to use.
I think with games like Mass Effect II, they used paper cutouts for the distant alien backgrounds so when the player moved closer and further away in the level, the mountains would shrink or grow in the level to maintain the illusion. I think that’s why some of the map levels in Mass Effect were restricted to allow you to only roam in and around close near the buildings, while the areas close near the mountains in the distance were all inaccessible to the player to stop the playing from getting too close to them.
These cutouts however allowed the illusion that you was down on this big vast planet that stretched out for miles but the reality is that you only had a small tiny play area to move around in and this design kept the engine down to a good FPS and maintained the illusion, but when you saw that your play area was restricted and you could not get up near those big mountains and the game kept you mostly close around the buildings, the game soon felt fake because they put guard rails and other barriers up around the area to stop the player wandering out to break that feeling up that this is not real but might be just a bunch of cutouts, they also threw in a couple of levels with the vehicles using
a real terrain.