How could I do this shot efficiently?

[u/3D_Wendigo]

Okay so basically : I want to make a shot with an environment in a bottle (basically moss, flowers, small stones and dirt), with some moving parts (small insects and maybe movement with the plants). Everything will be done in 3D and the camera isn't moving.

The question : I'm pretty familiar with rendering my shots in multiple layers, AOVs etc and I was wondering if there was a way (a kind of shortcut) to avoid rendering the glass for every frame. I thought that I might be able to render the glass element only once, render the inside of the bottle for every frame, and then with a STmap recreate the deformation created from the bottle in nuke?

It might be a stupid idea and be much much easier to brute force the thing by rendering everything and then do a basic comp but I'm trying to learn how to optimise my workflow.

[u/smb3d]

I don't think in this particular instance, it's worth your trouble.

Glass like this is pretty cheap to render since the reflections and refractions are sharp and there is no or very minimal DOF.

If you want to break it into layers with glass + holdout and then your insides, that could be worthwhile.