Fennius

Named after a Sagan quote, haven't done a proper space image in.....ye gods a long time, and I while I have a tendency to never finish a model and not be at a high standard on my modelling skill, I did used to like a good photoshop space background back in the day and I discovered Blenderkit had a free Enterprise D model so that solved that. A few tutorials later to make better space things, and I have dewfinitely levlled up from when i last did this....about 10 years ago/






Enterprise by Joachim Bornemann

Been working on this ship and finally just about finished her, for now named the USS Astraea, though I don't think I'll use that as a class name. Also found a good tutorial for gas giants, though I touched up the atmospheric glow in photoshop

Provisionally making these more steel blue with red dome units 'Assault Daleks' just because I like how they look and want an excuse to use them more. That said in this lighting they come out way more bright silver than blue.

Dalek model and fog is mine, everything else is a blenderk
it asset, especially the cityscape by Ryder Booth https://www.instagram.com/ryderb_photography/ Touched up in photoshop to change up the lighting.

Three high ranking Daleks having a tea party, now with a materials library to make the render look *considerably* better. Red is still a little bright for my personal tastes but this was basically a spur of the moment image



I have to say the hammered copper effect on the walls *works* for me for that Cushing-esque aesthetic

So this was a spur of the moment scene after seeing a similar one on deviant art, and I decided to do my own take on it with my old dalek models, and the saucer recoloured to blue and silver.

Frame rate fixed up, camera motions are a little jerky but this largely started as atest on cutting down render speeds

Right here we go, a full animation worthy enough to not be called a test:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LppsL3tH9kI



Still a little janky in places, especially as what seemed a nice smooth pace in the previews in blender turned out to be waaaay too fast, so I had to selectively slow bits, messing with the frame rate, but I've started messing with davinci resolve for some basic editing and it seems to have worked out acceptably.



There's a couple of small changes to the ships actually, I ever so slightly tweaked the depth on the hull texture and added a rough clearcoat so it catches the light better, I slightly darkened the red of the bussards, and I fixed the vane rotation glitch (although with the frame rates slowed you can't actually see it in the flyby scene - next time!).

Some mucking around with the saucer and experimenting with textures, my eternal enemy.

I am...unsure about the copper look.






Also, in the spirit of the retro feel I've been giving these daleks, a hoverbout/transolar disc.


I've never been a huge fan of Daleks zipping about on their own like fighter jets, so I think they can levitate but don't have the power for long distance flight unaided.

So, I re-watched the first Cushing movie a while ago, and that has put me on a bit of a Dalek binge, and I decided to create a Dalek designed to my own particular tastes.

So the first thing was that I wanted this to be a design I could put next to an NSD and have it feel just as real, but I wanted to move a little away from the solid tanky feel. I love the NSD, don't get me wrong, but I feel Daleks work best as a high tech alien look, sleek in the right places but fragile in others.

I also like my Daleks to have character and personality, so the colourful Cushing Daleks are a good starting point, though I will likely create more monochrome variants as well.




Starting with the fender, I liked the pointed look of the NSD style, and its very natural to extend the shape of the skirt (I'm actually shocked it took as long as it did for someone to do that), but it was a little too blocky for the feel I wanted. While the Cushing/DIOE/NDP fenders just look tacked on. The solution was to start with an NSD angular one and smooth out the corners to give it a sleeker look. IIRC I got the idea for a groove from LibrarianBot's excellent work on Deviant art, but I added more to give it that feeling of detail without resorting to nuts and bolts. Grooves ended up being a recurring detail on this design, convenient as it lends it a bit of design continuity between the different pieces, and also was really easy to model.




The underside obviously owes a lot of its look to the NSD and Mechmaster's designs. I decided I quite liked the softer creamy yellow rather than the bright blue or Mechmaster's dull orangey-red colours. Something about this feels fitting for a 60's styled design, and I decided to keep that colour for the ear bulbs and eye.



One of the things I wanted to test out was keeping the gold collars from the first movie, but still adding the slats - rather than going monochrome like the second movie, which imo made all the daleks look bland by comparison.


I would love to say I intentionally made the mesh have bigger holes in order to better show off this layering, and while thats partly true I also didn't look at reference pictures and forgot how fine the mesh in the show was. However I do think the end result works quite nicely - was a pain to model though, and strictly speaking its a bit wrong - the model has no back faces to the mesh's...well, mesh. However since that can't really be seen, I don't care.




As much as I didn't want rivets elsewhere to make the whole thing sleeker, I felt if I was going to put slats of this style on, they needed something as a visible connector in order to not feel the wrong sort of fragile, and give a little detail. The alternative might have been to do Imperial or NSD style integrated slats, but I wanted the technological look, and done well the classic slats actually look really good. (And with a CG design I am not on a budget here! )

There needed to be something in between the guns, or it looked too bare, so I went for an oval, but by sticking details on ti it seems more like an actual bit of tech now rather than just a random panel. I actually at one point tried a TVC21 style grill, but that didn't look right. Consider this an homage to that grill, while sticking closer to the TV style.



For the dome, I included the cowl - because that was a brilliant addition to the NSD - but I slimmed it down a bit. I went with NDP style slimmer lights (After the new series Daleks with tiny lights just don't seem right any more, and these ARE Cushing inspired). While I kept the actual chamfer to the dome, unlike the entirely hemispherical NDP one, I did like the groove going round the edge, so I took that and ran with it for detailing. Was considering doing more, but more panels started getting too bulky looking, and I decided less was more.




The Eye discs I went for a hybrid of classic and new - curved, translucent discs like the NSD, but I went for five instead of six. Look closely though and you'll see the central one is a ridged 'double-disc', to allude to the NSD's two central discs.

For the Eye bulb itself, the basic shape is the smoother Movie style, but with NSD ridges aroudn the lenses, and NDP groove. I was going to add more bumps and whatnot, but it just didn't look right with the toffee-apple shape. I was going to put in Deadp PLanet style three little rivets on the front, but again didn't quite work, so I went with the NDP placement on the sides, but kept them silver.

For the neck bin I went with NSD style grid beacsue...well tis easy to model somethign approximate (I realise the real one is a lot more detailed) and it looks good.

Neck struts I dd the clover style from the originals - its interesting and in keeping with the 'detailed but smooth' feel. They did however have to reach all the way up inside the dome as ending early I think just made it look cheap.

Neck Rings I did with the movie style chunkier looking chamfer, somewhat compensated for by yet another detail groove. Again, my excuse is visual consistency on the details, and totally not lazyness I do think it looks good though.



For the gun I actually modelled out an NDP one before deciding nto to use it - while that design certainly had...issues - a lot of the detail work was good. However scaling it down to the much shorter proportions it didn't quite work, and since everything else is a hybrid I thought I'd continue it. So I kept the design for the rods and the angular connectors, and kept the idea of the round, angled discs, but spaced them out and made them translucent akin to the original plastic octagons. The result feels distinctly more of an iconic Dalek weapon, but with a modern level of detail.




The sucker is nice and simple, pretty much the movie design with some NDP grooves for detail.

Final mesh has 123,000 + faces.