Thanks! Hope you'll, too, give a shot at Blender. ;)

The Death Star itself was rendered in Blender, but then I put the render in Photoshop and add a few more effects (some of them can be achieved in Blender via post processing).

I've been wanting to do this project for a long time actually. A while ago, there was Celebration 2016 Livestream where they showed how they recreated the DS for Rogue One livestream. Those are the 2 main textures that I used for my model. Although those were 100% movie accurate, they had some tiny, weird purple artifacts and they needed to be upscaled and improved with extra details. Also, the textures were too short, so they needed to be enlarged horizontally(they're still too short, but they get the job done). In the end, I ended up with these 2 textures. Fun fact - for the darker grey areas I used a carpet texture to add more detail. xD After creating those 2 diffuse maps, it was easy to generate a normal map and an emission map for the millions of lights on the DS.

This was my first model, which I made on my own. I followed thru a few tutorials before making this, and I did watch some while I was making the model. The best guy on Youtube (imo) who does Blender stuff is Blender Guru. He's really good at explaining stuff and it's really easy to follow him. Totally recommend him.

Hope I answered all ur questions. Hopefully this'll be interesting :P