I actually knew that I'd be asking for trouble if I used full spheres - so I made a sphere first and booleaned the back half off, so each dot is only a half sphere. Since only half need be visible having the full would make it needlessly larger. I was working in Carrara - the raw carrara file size (which doesn't really matter) is 98MB. When I saw that I thought I better export and see what I was looking at and the .obj was, as I said, 66MB. One thing I was thinking could do is maybe reduce the polys on the sphere (or half sphere). Carrara's default sphere is probably more poly heavy than it need be. Here's what my half sphere looks like in wireframe:

I'll try taking my booleaned sphere in the Vertex Modeler and reducing the polys and see if that gets me a better situation. It would necessitate starting over but it's probably worth it. My plan was to have a morph dials that raised the layers and revealed tier columns so you could have this style or tiered which could be quite nice. Certainly if any of you know a trick or two - Sharen? Sam? (is there really a Sam?) I'd love to hear it. Thanks all. Dave