My Artwork for the 2006 Doctor Who Series 2 BBC DVD Releases - Part III

The initial concept for the volume 5 vanilla involved a black Dalek to be towering over the Doctor and Rose, who were cowering beneath.This was a render I provided from my Dalek mesh in its V2 form with lots of inaccuracies. After the design was passed to the powers that be, the layout was rearranged to incorporate a Cyberman who was an obvious important addition in the end of series showdown. I produced a new render of the Black Dalek to fit in with this but it was deemed too unrealistic and eventually substitued for a photograph.

This was absolutely the right decision to be made because I was never under any illusion that you could pass my old black Dalek render off as a photograph, particularly when shown next to photographic renditions of the Doctor, Rose and a Cyberman costume. Even the best CGI in the world can usually be spotted as a false image and blending it into a real world image makes life very difficult. In the end I did make a small contribution to the Black Dalek as its arm was not at an appropriate angle in the original photograph so I produced a false arm which fitted the scene better.

The four bronze Daleks hovering in the background of the volume five vanilla were my most prominent contribution at that time and I was extremely honoured to have my work on the front of a Doctor Who DVD - something of a childhood dream come true. As so many young fans did, I looked at the old VHS video covers from Sid Sutton, and wanted to have that job. I have umpteen (badly drawn) renditions of alternative video covers, just as many fans today produce their own DVD covers instead of the offical ones. I was always in awe of Alistair Pearson's skill with the paintbrush and it's a tremendous privilege for me to have my 3D artwork printed in the same booklet as his stunning artwork.

The bronze Daleks themselves were rendered with HDRI and radiosity so I think they look quite nice in the sunlight, and they are thankfully too small to really show that they have inaccuracies I didn't have the time to correct! Thankfully, before going onto to the box-set I did have time to put a lot of work on my model.

For the internal spread of the tri-fold DVD holder, the idea for the Daleks over London was mooted quite early on in the process and Stuart and I discussed the various ways the Daleks could be shown. Displayed below are renders depicting how the Daleks might have massed in streams through the sky, very similar to how they poured out of the Genesis Ark, but the density of the blocks of Daleks made test images very overwhelming in places, and very empty elsewhere.

For a time in development the Daleks were scattered much more through the vertical plane and all roughly the same distance from the camera (similar to this outline below) but thankfully Stuart in his wisdom changed things around as one render did look worrying like Dalek wallpaper with them on that cloudy background.



To prepare my Dalek mesh to stand up to scrutiny I had to work done on almost every aspect.Changes were made to the head, neck, shouder slats, skirt dome-backing and the texture. The new series Daleks are fairly dark even in the light. The great temptation is to make 3D objects really reflective because shiny surfaces bring out the 3D renderer's ability to raytrace light beams and can make objects look more real, but really they are looking "hyper-real". A challenge of any 3D work is making matt-surface objects appear believable. I went back to the drawing board in trying to bring the surface more into reality and just making the comparison between the finished article on the left, and the bronze Daleks on the cover of volume 5 (shown above) you can see how exaggerated the reflectivity and gold colour had been.

The lighting of the Daleks within the scene was something of a challenge. The issue being that in the photographic background of Canary Wharf the sunlight is coming from behind and to the right of the scene. This meant that if the scene was lit totally realistically then only the rear right of the Daleks would be illuminated and virtualy all the fronts of the Daleks would be in shadow. The Daleks on the right in particular would have no light cast on them and although they would have some bounced lighting ambiently from the surroundings, there would be nothing front-on and they'd look rather lifeless.

The solution was to cheat slightly with a global light source keeping making sure they didn't appear dull. I did my best not to over-light the Daleks in the scene as its very tempting to make everything totally bright.

The final layout of the spread uses much more perspective and gives the picture a sense of scale. Stuart played around a little bit with the various configurations of lasers which in itself was a tricky business as the Cybermen themselves are not visible in the scene so there was a danger that the lasers wouldn't portray the fact the Daleks are trading fire with someone on ground level.

The black Dalek in the middle was another big piece of work. As with the volume 5 there was the suggestion that it should be photographic, but in the case of this spread, the majority of the image was rendered and therefore it was the photograph that looked out of place, plus it wasn't lit correctly for the scene. So it came down to using my Dalek with the textures tweaked until I was happier.

The shinyness of that black Dalek was very difficult to capture and as we've never seen the prop in daylight there was nothing for reference. The image on the right shows a very rough early version of the black Dalek before I had modified the textures and changed the perspective, and it looks totally flat, as if made of wood. The final version can be seen below and has many more highlights on its suraface.

Stuart's composition work in creating the backdrop and playing with the elements of the scene is great and after many, many man-hours of work and late nights, I think the final spread has great impact. The version below is an early mockup I did with some rather over-the-top devastation!

All artwork copyright themindrobber & the BBC - No reproduction without persmission