T is for Tear Your Hair Out!

Instructions for drawing a Dalek in 3D using Autodesk's AutoCAD;

1.   Tear you hair out, it is far easier to do this at the start when you are still fresh and innocent of what is to come, than to do it at the inevitable point where all hope is lost and the dark walls of reality are closing-in.

2.   Go and find something to do that will bring greater reward and satisfaction in a shorter time period...this author suggests naked lion-wrestling.

3.   Er...that's it.

So, the head; I nearly continued "went together quite easily", but it took most of a week! To be fair, the neck/face grid/visor thing was surprisingly easy and I got that done in a day, but the rest was a shed-load of faffing about, and while it looks 'like' the totally fictional (and themselves differing from episode to episode or even individual to individual) mutated Kaled's, there have been various tweaks and compromises (for compromise read 'Feck-it! That'll do...it looks all right') to the point where it's really an approximation of an NSD.

The helmet and eye-stalk would make an excellent Sci-fi automated gun-turret/coastal artillery bunker thing, which had me and Tom placing naval gun-barrels in the slot to see what they'd look like...they look good! And (never start a sentence with 'and', yes Swan'y I know!) as it's a .dwg file it can be 3D printed pretty much 'as is', and could be scaled to any ratio with a couple of key-strokes.

Indeed, trying to find decent CAD files on-line (yes - to cheat!) I've discovered there aren't any really, there's a beautifully rendered black one somewhere and some nice construction drawings for home-builders to knock-up Daleks from plywood and resin...and bits of washing machine, but a dearth of CAD drawings, so if I get this finished I thought I might offer the files (there are several now, the original drawing got so code-heavy it kept crashing the PC...at three o'clock every day!) on a CD on FeeBay, I have no idea if it would sell, but discs of far more boring CAD-stuff do seem to sell so...?

Speaking of 'if I finish it'; note how I've cut the shoulders off in the screen-grab...I thought that if I could master the head, I could go back to the shoulders with the certainty of success; I had a second attempt this morning - I thought wrong...like I said; easier to tear you hair out at the start and find something safer to do...base-jumping from urban-semi's anyone?