Daleks!

Building my own Dalek models was a desire I've had for a while, but it was only until recently that I really felt the motivation to do it. I was confident enough in Blender after making various hard surface prop models to take an attempt at realizing the iconic pepperpots originally written by Terry Nation, designed by Raymond Cusick and built by Shawcraft Models in 1963 for Doctor Who's second serial.

To begin with I focused on just the original design as seen in "The Daleks" (or The Dead Planet, or The Mutants, or Beyond the Sun, or...whatever) which would serve as a base template on which to make new elements and modifications for future designs (much like Shawcraft did).

Some variations were easy, like simply changing the texture on the dome section for the Emperor's Guard in 1967's "The Evil of The Daleks", while others like the Imperial redesign from 1988's "Remembrance of The Daleks" required a tricky change to the general body proportions, as the props in that serial were made from a different mould (you can see it best when one is side-by-side with a 1960s prop). I knew that I wanted to do as many variants from the Classic Series (1963-1989) as I could for the sake of completion, plus the two 1960s feature films starring Peter Cushing.

Not every variant got a unique mesh, however. Some were mere texture swaps as this project also doubled up as an experiment with modular asset usage. As such some models are not completely accurate to their screen counterparts. Since textures and meshes were shared across different designs across time, some minor details got lost but the general aesthetic remains accurate.