Iridium Communications Satellite: "almost there..."

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.

Sweet!!