“The height of the clouds and atmosphere are largely arbitrary and set for the sake of
appearance. The terrain is also exaggerated by about 10 times. The orbital “eye” view is about
10,000 km (~6,200 miles) from the surface.

A two dimensional digital elevation model was first rendered in jDem846 (an open-source
learning project of mine) using the MRO MOLA 128 pix/deg elevation dataset. In that model, I
picked a sea level and scripted it such that terrain at or below that level was flat and blue.

The resulting model was then brought into GIMP were I painted in land features using a NASA
Blue Marble Next Generation image for the source textures. There is no scientific reasoning
behind how I painted it; I tried to envision how the land would appear given certain features or
the effects of likely atmospheric climate. For example, I didn’t see much green taking hold within
the area of Olympus Mons and the surrounding volcanoes, both due to the volcanic activity and
the proximity to the equator (thus a more tropical climate). For these desert-like areas I mostly
used textures taken from the Sahara in Africa and some of Australia. Likewise, as the terrain
gets higher or lower in latitude I added darker flora along with tundra and glacial ice. These
northern and southern areas textures are largely taken from around northern Russia. Tropical
and subtropical greens were based on the rainforests of South America and Africa.

Finally, that image was brought back into jDem846 as a layer to be reapplied to the same MOLA
dataset, but rendered as a spherical projection (like Google Earth). I scripted the model to apply
a three-dimensional cloud layer, add an atmosphere, and dampen specular lighting on dry land
and under clouds. There are some other scripted tweaks here and there.”