One of the ideas that struck me fairly early in this project is that it would be cool to compare the theme park versions of the castle to the “real” versions in the films. If you’ve ever walked through the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios in Orlando, Hollywood, or Japan, you know just how overwhelming it is to approach the towering facade of Hogwarts. Very effective theme park design.
Even so, much of the castle has been removed, the remaining sections have been modified, and the scale has been significantly reduced. (The filmmakers built their original Hogwarts miniature with a very specific real-world scale in mind.) The theme park version is highly evocative of the castle seen on the silver screen – specifically in Half-Blood Prince – but it’s still its own thing. (Three things, actually, since there are even slight differences between the versions at the three resorts.)
So…what would it look like to plop the Universal version down next to the cinematic version? That’s a question I intend to answer as the project progresses – hopefully with renders of them side by side! – but for now, you’re going to have to settle for these incomplete and very rough 3D scans of the Hollywood version.
These images are the fruit of photogrammetry, the science of extracting 3D measurements from photos. On a recent visit to Universal Studios Hollywood, I took about 400 photos of the castle. After heavily color-correcting these shots in Photoshop to bring out shadow detail, I threw them all into Meshroom, which dutifully set out to create a textured 3D model from the photos without any need for human assistance.
The first attempt failed. Unfortunate, but not surprising. There were angles I couldn’t capture due to the geography of the park and my own time constraints. (Not to mention the fact that we were trying to, you know, enjoy a day in the park!) Meshroom got confused and couldn’t connect all the disparate parts into one unified 3D model.
Not a problem. When I split the photos into six different sets that focused on smaller sections of the castle, Meshroom handled each set just fine on its own. Then I brought them together in Blender and manually lined them up with each other on top of an aerial photo. An HDRI sky added a bit of visual interest to the environment.
The scans needed a lot of manual cleanup, and even so, you can still see a lot of yucky fringes and artifacts, especially around the edges of each scan. That’s totally fine for my purposes…this is all just a rough guide for when I create my own model from scratch.
[EDIT 8/14/20: Wow, this post continues to be among the most popular on this blog! Clearly I’m not the only one interested in the changing architecture of Hogwarts. If this is your first time visiting, be sure to check out the rest of the blog too!]
All right, time for that mega-post I’ve been slowly working on for the last few weeks! Finishing this today has been a nice distraction as I try to recover from a nasty cold and/or ear infection and/or laryngitis and/or sinus infection. Off to see the doctor in just a bit to figure out what’s going on.
Anyway, if you’re anything like me, you probably only caught one or two of the changes to Hogwarts while watching the films…and even then, perhaps it was barely a conscious realization. That’s good! That means the filmmakers were successful in preserving the “feel” of Hogwarts even as they had to change, add, and remove certain structures to meet the needs of the various stories (and various directors). Because yes, they made changes throughout the films – large, small, and everything in between.
Just what were those changes? Let’s take a small detour from my model work and find out! Here are the changes I would consider major, in chronological order. I’ve attempted to find photos that illustrate the changes, though the angles are often very different. It’s definitely not an exhaustive list, either. There are plenty of small tweaks I’ve left out – adding a small extra turret, slightly moving a wall, tweaking the angle or height of a structure, etc. Those will be part of the model, but there’s no sense detailing every one of them here. Oh, also, I’m also just looking at exteriors; the interiors aren’t really part of the scope of this project. Even so, it’s gonna be a long post. Bear with me.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Stuart Craig and his team designed and built the first iteration of the castle. It’s a physical miniature at 1:24 scale, although it’s still so huge that a person can stand at lake level and their head won’t even reach the bottom floors of the castle.
Side note: this may be my favorite shot of the castle from any of the films. I do really like some of the changes to come, but boy, does this image stick beautifully in my mind.
Anyway, onward!
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Here’s where things start to get interesting. Relatively modest changes, but still noticeable…
To accommodate the Herbology scene, the greenhouses were added to the northeast corner of the castle. (The “before” shot is of a 3D model created by Matt Wright during the production of the first film – check out his website!)
The Whomping Willow was added nearby, on one of the lawns of the real-world Alnwick Castle filming location.
The curtain walls walls and small towers surrounding those lawns were redesigned to look partially ruined and less Alnwick-like.
The roofline of the nearby training grounds tower changed. (At this point, this structure is still basically a section of Alnwick, but with a different taller roofline.) The below comparison also gives you another view of the change to the curtain walls.
Not too many changes, right? Oh, just you wait…
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Okay, big changes here! The first is stylistic. Most of the spires in the first two films are fairly short. But in this film, many of them were made significantly taller and steeper, creating a much more Gothic look.
Time plays a big role in the film’s climax, so a new clock tower was added behind the castle. This was connected to the existing structures with a new enclosed bridge, which also attached to a new hospital wing on top of the existing castle. Attached to the new clock tower is a new courtyard, and attached to the courtyard is a new wooden bridge across a ravine. (This was one of the few additions I noticed when I first saw the film.)
At the other end of the wooden bridge is a stone circle and a path leading down the hill to the new site of Hagrid’s redesigned hut…all the way on the opposite side of the grounds from its location in the first two films! (The nearby Whomping Willow similarly moves somewhere down here.)
What Dumbledore refers to as the “Dark Tower” is added as the location of Sirius Black’s holding cell. This necessitates the slight relocation of the semicircular tower and suspension bridge that were already in this area, as well as the removal of a small structure modeled directly after the Chapter House at the real-world Durham Cathedral (another filming location for the early movies).
You can also glimpse some significant changes to the landscape in the shot above. You know the Quidditch training grounds seen mainly in the first film? The spot where Harry learns to fly? Yeah, the landscape literally swallows up much of this area as new hills form behind the school. The curtain walls that enclosed this area now disappear right into the hillsides, as you can see near the bottom left. This is part of a larger trend of removing Alnwick Castle influences from the castle over the course of the series.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
A much more modest set of changes, but important nonetheless. For one, the hills behind the school added in the previous film become the location of the owlery, a relatively small tower that stands alone on a rocky outcrop.
The entry area at the front of the Great Hall is revised with a second clock tower and a new courtyard (often referred to in fan circles as the Viaduct Courtyard) is added in front.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Whoa. No major changes here that I’ve been able to find, although a few of the remaining short spires get steepened to match the changes in POA.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
This was the last film to use the physical miniature, so this is the version that can now be seen in person at the Warner Bros. Studio Tour in London.
The Astronomy tower plays an important role in this film, and the team ended up designing an entirely new tower to fit the bill. To make room for it, the Dark Tower and the semicircular Defense Against the Dark Arts tower get axed, although the new Astronomy tower does share some design elements with the latter. (The snowy “Before” shot is from Chamber of Secrets, in order to better match the angle. Ignore the pre-steepened spires on the nearby towers.)
One of the last few vestiges of Alnwick Castle, the training grounds tower, gets replaced with a much simpler version with a smaller footprint.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2
The filmmakers decided to go with an all-digital Hogwarts for this final entry, for better flexibility in shot design (and to make it a lot easier to create battle damage). Although the CGI Hogwarts is generally designed to be identical to the miniature, there are still some changes.
For starters, the Viaduct Courtyard gets significantly enlarged, as this is a major location in the Battle of Hogwarts.
The original viaduct – a feature dating all the way back to the first film! – is removed. Instead, there’s now a new, larger viaduct. Rather than connecting one half of the castle to the other, it connects the castle – specifically, the enlarged Viaduct Courtyard – to an adjacent area of land. (The area of the courtyard that connects to the viaduct receives some new gatehouses, too.) This is the location of several notable scenes, including the final scene before the epilogue.
Down at lake level, the boathouse is seen up close for the first time, and it gets a somewhat revised design. (The DH shot is a render of the 3D model as posted by Nic Henderson on his website.)
Interestingly, what remained of the training grounds area – all the curtain walls and so forth behind the greenhouses – doesn’t make it into the CG version of the castle. Perhaps this is simply because they knew weren’t going to have any scenes back here. With that, the last traces of Alnwick Castle’s real-world design elements are removed.
Lastly, the wooden bridge that was added in Azkaban gets lengthened. (Before Neville blows it up, that is.) Still the same basic design, though.
Beyond the Potter Films: Universal, Fantastic Beasts, etc.
As the films were wrapping up, Universal Studios opened its Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, featuring an impressive Hogwarts facade on the exterior of its headliner attraction, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey. This was built on a smaller scale, relying on forced perspective to make it look like it matches the scale seen in the films. The design seems to be somewhat loosely based off the front of the Half-Blood Prince version, as it includes the Astronomy tower (sorta) but the courtyard/viaduct configuration doesn’t reflect the Deathly Hallows changes. (The entire back of the castle is also missing, since it can’t be seen from inside the park.) Similar versions are later built in Hollywood and Japan.
Although the Harry Potter films end with Deathly Hallows, Hogwarts makes an onscreen appearance in the Fantastic Beasts series as well. It seems to be identical to the CG version seen in Deathly Hallows, though I haven’t looked at it in great detail. (Since this takes place many years before even the first Potter film, it essentially retcons the castle as having always looked the way it does in Deathly Hallows.)
The castle is also explorable (sometimes even on broomstick) through a variety of console games for the various films. The castle designs are typically similar to those of the corresponding films. There’s also Pottermore’s “Welcome to Hogwarts” feature, which seems to be based on the DH2/FB CG version, but I haven’t looked into it closely enough to be able to document differences, if any.
So What?
Whew. We’re coming to the end of this mega-post. Only one question remains: if all these changes can already be seen in pictorial form, why bother with a model? Well, here’s the thing…I’ve selected the best comparison images I could find for this post, but you’ll notice that as I said, the before/after camera angles are NEVER identical. Why should they be? The different films get to show the castle from different angles, under different lighting schemes, emphasizing different aspects of its design for a variety of aesthetic and plot-related reasons. The only problem is that it makes it a lot harder to do really quick and direct visual comparisons. Your brain has to adjust to the new angle even as it looks for discrepancies.
So the aim of this whole model project is simple: I want to be able to lock the camera down (virtually speaking) and watch the castle change from film to film. The parts that stay the same will be identical quite literally on a pixel-by-pixel basis, while the changes will immediately jump out. It’s going to take a while to get the model to that state, but I’m sure enjoying the journey. More to come soon!
One thing about me is that I don’t like to stick to any one part of a personal project for too long. So sure enough, I’ve put the Alnwick model on hold as I’ve jumped back to the Prisoner of Azkaban version of the castle.
At the moment I’m mainly focusing on an area of the castle that’s not very visible in the films. On a basic level, the castle (not counting any outbuildings, etc.) consists of two separate buildings that are attached by a few bridges over a deep, narrow ravine. The northern building is modeled largely after Durham Cathedral while the southern building includes the rather more unique designs of the Great Hall and Turris Magnus (the tall, steep tower with Dumbledore’s office near the top). It’s the southern building that I’m working on at the moment…but I’m focusing on the northern facade, the one that faces the other building. The filmmakers didn’t have many reasons to send their cameras through that area…but that doesn’t mean I can’t!
Obviously there aren’t any textures here, but this is another example of an area that’s approaching final levels of detail. The last few renders are especially cool to me because they’re from angles that would be impossible in the “real world” – the camera would be underground, or inside the northern block.
Some of my most proud moments since the last post have included sculpting a bas-relief Hogwarts crest (seen on the white square near the top of the last render above) and figuring out the Turris Magnus spire, whose shape smoothly blends from a hexadecagon (16 sides) to a circle near the base. I also like the suspension bridge, one of three footpaths between the two blocks of the castle. (Its biggest moment in the films is in Goblet of Fire, when the dragon chases Harry right through/past it…but that shot is over in, like, a second.)
Ooh, as an added bonus, here’s a fully navigable version of the model via Sketchfab. There are some numbered annotations that point out landmarks. I don’t plan on uploading one of these for every single future post, but I’ll try to do it from time to time so you can go exploring.
I’ve been eagerly tracking the progress of Blender 2.8, the upcoming version of the free 3D software I’m using for this project. It’s still in beta, so it’s not recommended for use in production. There’s always that small chance that it will crash and eat all your data. And unfortunately, I don’t know any spells that will uncorrupt a .blend file.
Nevertheless, yesterday I made the switch! 2.8 has some truly incredible new features that will be really helpful for this project, and I just couldn’t resist any longer. It’s not worth getting into the technical side of things here, but suffice it to say that for me, this is an upgrade that’s worth the minor inconvenience of performing manual daily backups.
At the same time, I’ve been adding in some HDRIs. HDRI (high dynamic range imaging) refers to a particular type of environment for the model. It allows a lot of possibilities for dynamic, realistic images, and one of the easiest ways get started is to use HDRI photography made available online. (Thanks for the incredible freebies, HDRI Haven!) The results can be pretty cool:
Note that the castle isn’t actually sitting on those pretty mountains; those are just part of the photographic HDRI background that’s also providing lighting for the model. This angle just happens to make it kinda look like it’s sitting on the mountains. (My plan is to model the landscape around the castle later on.) Also note that this was rendered with Blender 2.8’s new EEVEE engine…it’s not nearly as accurate as Blender’s more robust path tracer, Cycles, but it’s insanely fast. The render above was done within 6 seconds. I can move around the model in real-time and it looks almost exactly like that.
You’ll see some blocky shapes in the back of that render, too. Those are just placeholders for some of the structures in the back of the castle; I’m trying to figure out height data by matching camera angles from the films. Compare these two shots:
Pretty close in terms of angle, right? (This was rendered prior to the switch to HDRIs in Blender 2.8, hence the plainer sky.)
Simultaneously, work continues on the separate Alnwick Castle model. On the right, the octagonal towers beginning to take shape, rendered with the slower but more accurate Cycles engine. (This is what Hagrid was dragging the Christmas tree toward in the first film.)
And here’s an EEVEE view from slightly later in the process. They’re a lot taller here than in real life, since Stuart Craig and his team basically took the footprint of this building and stretched it way higher. You’ll also note that I’ve loaded another HDRI sky into this model.
Still soooooooo much more to do…I’m really still just getting started. But the new features in 2.8 are going to be a big help! I’m also making slow but steady progress on a mega-post that will use stills from the films to illustrate some of the major design changes that this blog is all about. Stay tuned!
All right, let’s take a look at the project so far, since I’ve already been working on it for, like, a month before starting this blog.
First step was to gather as much information as possible: shots from the films, photos of the original Hogwarts miniature from the Warner Bros. Studio Tour, publicly available technical drawings of the miniature, behind-the-scenes footage, tourist photos and drone shots and floor plans of real-world filming locations…you name it.
Then came the important decision of where to start the 3D model – and which version to start with. Rather than jumping right in with super detailed final meshes, I blocked in a few basic shapes from the various films as a proof of concept in Blender. (My biggest concern was whether I had enough “vertical” information about the heights of various elements; I was pretty set on floor plans.)
Satisfied that this thing was actually going to work, I started over from scratch. The Prisoner of Azkaban version of the castle seemed like the best place to start.
Hey cool, it’s starting to look like Hogwarts!
Then something else occurred to me. I thought back to circa 2008, playing around with the now-defunct Photosynth service from Microsoft. You would feed it a series of photos of the same object or setting, taken from lots of different angles, and it would generate a 3D point cloud (with the original photos hanging in the space around it). I wondered if there was anything like that on the market today.
Turns out that photogrammetry freeware is a thing. I installed Meshroom and got my computer to start generating point clouds and meshes from moving shots of the castle. As you can see, these tend to be pretty rough; resolution, motion blur, lossy compression, dynamic range, and choices of angles are all limiting factors in terms of quality. But many shots still yielded data that I could use for reference in building the actual models.
Generating and refining these reference models takes lots of time and computing power, so this easily ate up at least a week in which I was doing no actual modeling. It was really one of my periodic returns to the information-gathering phase. In one Google detour, I stumbled upon some aerial footage of Alnwick Castle (one of the Hogwarts exterior filming locations for the first two films) and realized I could do more photogrammetry for that location, too.
Again, pretty rough. Nothing from these models is ever going to be directly included in the final project. They’re just a good way of collecting vertical measurements when no elevation drawings are available.
After spending so much time looking at shots of Alnwick, I felt compelled to start doing some actual modeling of those areas. I decided to start a separate model of Alnwick Castle itself; the plan is that I’ll eventually copy the appropriate segments over to the main model.
Lots of jumping around here; there are gaps in my references for certain areas, but I’m hoping to have more information soon. That last render – my most recent, from just this morning – gives a good sense for the level of detail I’d like to see in the entire model. (That part of Alnwick, the warder’s tower, was used as an archway leading toward the location of Hagrid’s hut in the first two films.)
Whew…that brings us up to speed on the current state of the project. Hopefully future posts will allow me to focus a little more on specific areas, since I won’t be summarizing a month’s worth of work all at once.
Like what you see? Got a question? Feel free to leave a comment. Otherwise, see you soon, I hope!
All my life, I’ve often found myself tumbling headlong into unusual obsessive hobbies. In January 2019, I tumbled into a new one. I was struck by the realization that Hogwarts Castle underwent a number of design changes over the course of the Harry Potter films, and I wanted to be able to watch a time-lapse of those changes from a stationary vantage point. Any stationary vantage point. The only solution was to create a 3D model…of all 7+ versions of Hogwarts…in my free time.
So I got started.
I have no idea how long this passion project will go for – I do tend to jump between my different interests quite a bit – but it’s been a good time so far, and I thought I’d share my progress with any likeminded fans of the Potter franchise, cool architecture, and/or 3D modeling.
Hogwarts 4D 