The Krotons

Doctor Who in the 1960s had a running self-imposed challenge of creating a new monster/villain that could replicate the runaway success of the Daleks in 1963. Over the rest of the First Doctor's tenure the series would introduce the Voord, Zarbi, Mechanoids, Chumblies and War Machines to generally little success. The only true success was the Cybermen in 1966, though the creative intent behind them was quite different to their more mechandise-minded predecessors. Following the Daleks' temporary retirement in 1967, the Cybermen, Ice Warriors and Great Intelligence stepped up to be the defining bad guys of the Second Doctor's era.

But in 1968, as Season Six began, the world was swept up in the climax of the Space Race, which led to a series of space and future-themed serials and a new wave of Dalek imitators, complete with clunky fiberglass costumes and distorted electronic voices. Chief among them were the Krotons, who appeared in the fourth serial of the season titled...wait for it..."The Krotons".

On a conceptual level the Krotons are quite novel, being composed of living mineral matter which can change to a liquid state when low on energy (much of the serial's first half deals with their unethical methods of accumulating enough energy to fully revive). They can never truly die, but instead "exhaust" and liquefy. But both the script and the production do this concept no favours at all.

The realization of the two Krotons is laughable in retrospect. They arrive half-way through an often-panned serial with a design that loses all credibility the moment they appear in wide shot, and spend most of their time bickering between themselves in bad South African accents. But perhaps it's their pathetic legacy that makes them so appealing to me. They're just ridiculous, and that's fun. And I like to have fun.

The model was sculpted, unwrapped and textured all in one day in around 5-6 hours. The process was made easy by the mostly symmetrical nature of the design, and the geometric crystalline shapes are well-suited to low-poly workflows. I built the model in several components, which were then later combined to make two variants as they appear in the serial - one with a nutrient-feeding pipe and one with a weapon attachment.

The texturing style followed that of other 3D models I had done, being based on photo materials which then had highlights and ambient occlusion painted on. No colour photographs of the Kroton costumes exist, but they are referred to as "silver giants" in the serial. For rigging I started with the pipe variant as that had the most amount of bones required. I then duplicated the armature and deleted the unnecessary bones for the weapon variant.