We've been overhauling most of the attic level background, including its "shell"! We've also updated the lighting a bit.
Rather than modeling and exporting Blender meshes, we've remade all the scene's geometry right inside Unity with the ProBuilder add-on (meant for level blockouts and basic geometry). This gives some of our artists (who aren't 3D modelers) the ability to update the level background easily, for rare cases where it's necessary.
For example, if we ever extend the level boundaries as part of development... Would we relay this to artists and wait for lots of back and forth asset swaps? Nope! We can now reach right in the scene and drag the walls further, move props around, and more.
Using ProBuilder in Unity is likely going to be the gold standard for us going forward. We plan to use it for our Story Map blockouts and final geometry, as well as more level backgrounds. It's quicker, easier, and editable by everyone on the team.
After switching to Deferred Rendering, we were also able to turn on more lights in the scene for a cozier feel. This is because extra lights now have a negligible rendering cost compared to before.
There are loads of other reasons we had to update this background. One of the main reasons was that it had an entirely unfinished top area! So, we resized the entire scene and fit a loft area in the top.
The background is now full and proper, and we can consider it almost done (unless more polish is done for optimization/fun, and it probably will be!)
Bonus Clip! It's not important, but we thought it looked very trippy and interesting to resize the entire background at once.