The NOAA-18 weather satellite is owned and operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to provide robust and detailed meteorological information allowing us to understand and predict weather patterns across the globe. The California Academy of Sciences requested a detailed model of the satellite which will be featured at 4K x 4K resolution in an animation entitled "Fragile Planet" at the Morrison Planetarium scheduled to open in Fall of 2008. They provided a base model created by Dan Pisut at NOAA, which I rebuilt and textured in Maya 2008, and rendered with Mental Ray.

View full resolution render (4K x 4K resolution - 18.6 Mb)

View this animation in stereoscopic 3D. (To view crosseye stereoscopic animations, simply cross your eyes until the left and right images converge in the center.)