The constellation contains a total of 66 satellites, with 11 birds per orbital plane and using 6 orbits.
I think this is a realistic approximation of the orbital data for the Iridium satellite constellation. Granted the periods, footprints, altitudes and separation are by no means exact, but this will work fine for a good looking demo of intra-satellite communication.
Obviously the final animation will look photo realistic and not primitives that are used in this test...
Wow.. sorry it's been a while since my last post. I had some work in Delaware and was unable to do any work on the satellite until now. So here is an update, and at this point I am building the animation itself so if there is any interest in seeing work in progress I will post it to YouTube, if not then I will just post the completed product.
Thanks for checking back in and not abandoning my blog : )
Here is another robot animation I just completed and uploaded. This one places bikes in a serpentine conveyor and utilizes spaces in buildings that would otherwise be unusable. The entire system, from loading area to the arm and overhead loading points are designed to accommodate almost any type of bicycle available today
I am back to share more 3D delicious goodness, Ambient Occlusion
A major client of mine has been kind to provide me with a rather large rendering farm to use in the off hours. Since there is never enough computer power available to me, I have been making trips into the city (using my unlimited ride metrocard) to Citigroup center for late night computational sessions. Now with access to over 40 Intel xeon processors, I can afford to add detail and rendering features that would be impossible to use if I only had my personal computer to work with.
So before I render any new animations in vivid jaw-dropping quality, I have chosen to revisit the robot and apply some ambient occlusion to the rendering…
Turned out much better as the AO makes all the modeling detail I put into the original mesh stand out.
Now fully rigged for animation, this Iridium Satellite is almost ready for flight. The photovoltaic array has been rigged to each track at independent angles and it appears that the actual bird has three optical sight ports, one for each side, so I have made the required adjustments. The texturing and fine geometric detail have been done and all that remains to to create the simulation of the message passing, between the ship to ship and terrestrial antennas at the bottom. Once the radio wave simulation has been developed with enough visual appeal, I will begin construction of the constellation… Render instances are really going to save my bacon on this one although this entire satellite mesh only takes 513 MB of ram to render as it is shown here, using the ambient occlusion algorithm and even less without.
Interesting Information About The Satellite Constellation
The Iridium constellation has it's very own international telephone country code(s) +8816 and +8817. This is do to the fact that the constellation is in low earth orbit and is not "physically located" in any one country. Voice, data and paging services are available at any location on earth (including the polar regions, sea going vessels and aircraft in flight) that has an unobstructed view of the sky, although service in North Korea is artificially gimped due to the U.S. State Department.
We are getting closer to the textures phase of this project, at this point you can see that most of the geometry has been completed. Thanks to a new update to Cinema 4D, I can now have the entire constellation of satellites on the screen at one time and still fit within the memory requirements for the rendering cluster. This is some powerful new feature (shown with bike example below) as you only have to load the reference object into memory, then make numerous duplicates of that object without the outrageous memory penalty that is expected with mass duplication of complex geometry.
This makes scenes with hundreds of trees or as in the case of this animation, 66 satellites possible on commodity household PCs that you can round up from friends when you have a huge animation and the corresponding thirst for CPU number crunching goodness. Although a mega 3D workstation with jaw dropping amounts of RAM is still on the menu, this update to Cinema 4D now adds many times more value to your CURRENT RAM investment with just a simple change of the software.
While at Starbucks in midtown, I have created the optical sight port. This is used as kind of a sextant in space, to provide the satellite's computer with a star reference for it's orientation and location in orbit and in the constellation. I don't know if the real satellite has more then one sight port, there is a real Iridium satellite in the Smithsonian museum in DC.. Before I start the final rendering for this animation, I intend to visit and have a close look at the real thing to see how far my artistic license has differed from the genuine article.
Also added: telescopic stabilizers for the main mission antennas
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