Classic Dalek Model

My ‘classic’ dalek model is based mostly on the daleks that appeared in the 1966 Doctor Who adventure “The Power of the Daleks”, partly because the BBC put a lot of really good photographs of them on their website and partly because the silver/blue daleks from the sixties were always my favourite. There are some differences from the original however, most notably:

• The base has more rounded edges, particularly on the underside, to give an effect reminiscent of the skirt of a hovercraft. I know it's not canonical, but I like it.
• The proportions of the skirt panels are more like those of the renegade faction daleks in “Remembrance of the Daleks” (1988). Frankly it was just easier that way: I can't seem to reproduce the panels as they appeared on the original daleks without them coming out slightly twisted in the middle.

The model has the following proportions (the units of measurement are arbitrary):

• Base height 85 units,
• Skirt height 640 units,
• Shoulder section height 340 units,
• Neck bin (grill) height 216 units,
• Dome height 195 units,
• Total height 1476 units.

I use POV-Ray version 3.6 to render my images, mainly because it's free. Building models for POV-Ray can be quite a challenge though and there are always bits that I'm not happy with, so I'm always fiddling with the models and trying to improve them: as a result this model is currently at version number 119. A slide show is available showing the early development stages of the model.

I have adapted the model to produce variants representing the Daleks as they appeared in several other Doctor Who adventures, and these can be found on the Classic Dalek Variants page. For a discussion of Dalek history, including speculation as to why the Daleks appear in so many subtly different forms, please see Dalek History and the Time War.

Click here to see a photograph of the Dalek model kit produced by Comet Miniatures some years back.