These screenshots I took in Blender are the final product of a commission I worked on for over a year, of my client's planet Ayrum. These represent the planet as it appears at the Northern Spring Equinox, at various angles and different times of day. This project had multiple phases and produced many maps and figures, so I'll be making multiple posts about it over the course of multiple days, working from the earliest results up to the images used in these screenshots.
First, the tectonic history sequence, covering about 600 million years of activity. The colors of continental crust in the gif's top half represent which plate it will belong to in the end, and the colors used in the bottom half represent what plates they belong to at the time
With the tectonic history settled, it's easier to determine what the topography should look like. The two greyscale elevation maps start from the lowest trench depth and from sea level respectively, and the color-graded elevation map has dry land differentiated from bodies of water.
Dipping into Blender once again, with some screenshots where I used the color-graded elevation map as the image texture and the greyscale elevation map as the displacement texture, to emphasize the topography. This will be all for today, but there is much more to come. These maps were made for the user @umbrace-ramble, to whom I am very thankful for this commission and all the experience it inspired me to gain. Rendered in Photopea with the aid of Blender, screenshots taken in Blender, November 2022-January 2024