Attempt to make 3D models for roughly-shaped moons of Mars. This is not really a 3D model, this is a regular SE "planet" with a regular cubemap texture and elevation map, but the elevation amplitude is very big. The elevation map is 16-bit and defines the global shape of the moon, with local terrain features like craters added linearly to it. The result is quite promising! And the main benefit of this method is virtually unlimited texture resolution. This would be impossible to achieve with a hand-made 3D mesh with a single texture.

Phobos:

Deimos:

The drawback is that local features are hard to control, because they are applied at the map pre-processing stage (in Photoshop). It would probably be better to use two maps: a low-res global shape map, and a high-res local terrain map, and combine them in the engine.

Another drawback is that local features are added to the elevation radially from the body's center, not in the direction of the global shape normal. This may lead to distortion of the shapes of small crater. Also it's impossible to define a body with very rough shape, where 2 or more points lie on the same radius-vector.