Iridium Communications Satellite: ET Phone Home, just not above the 38 parallel : )

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.

See you on the next update...