Marble Staircase Tower, AKA Dumbledore’s Tower, AKA Turris Magnus

All right…as promised, it’s time for one of Hogwarts’ most recognizable exterior design features to go from simple block-in to fully detailed model. I’m talking, of course, about the marble staircase tower, also referred to as the turris magnus (on the Marauder’s Map) or Dumbledore’s tower. You can go all the way back to Stuart Craig’s original concept sketch for the Hogwarts exterior, and this tower is already there. It’s the biggest tower, the one on the left. A few of the details are slightly different than the final design, but it’s pretty close:

This thing is massive. To give you a sense of scale, in the real-world environment envisioned by the design team, the top is over 600 feet above lake level. The main body of the tower is 92 feet wide. The spire alone is over 200 feet tall, with somewhere around 50 feet of that being the enormous copper finial at the top. For my fellow Disneyland fans…the entire freakin’ Matterhorn would fit inside the spire. Near the top, that smaller triple turret on the left is Dumbledore’s office; the castle’s moving staircases sit below, inside the cylindrical body of the tower. Mr. Craig has readily acknowledged in interviews that there are design choices here that simply couldn’t be built in real life. Fortunately, magic covers many architectural sins, and personally, I think the films are all the better for it. The turris magnus is featured prominently in the very first shots of Hogwarts and it’s part of what made such an impression on me in the early 2000s.

The first detail I wanted to capture was the dormers sitting along the sides of the spire. This is where the ridiculous, over-the-top dragon chase in Goblet of Fire really came in handy, because Harry and the Hungarian Horntail end up on these rooftops, providing closeup miniature shots and even closer shots of a partial set for Daniel Radcliffe to interact with. I decided to incorporate all these details into the dormers, even though the main 1:24 scale miniature probably wasn’t quite this detailed. (The closeup shots were accomplished with other bespoke miniatures on larger scales.)

Let’s also pull back for a wider shot, including some detail work on the finial and the beginnings of work on Dumbledore’s office:

(By the way, sorry for that other spire near the bottom middle, the one that has the copper patina discoloration near the top but no finial. Keeps showing up in renders. Eventually I’ll add the finial, I promise!)

Next came the stepped corbelling at the base of the turrets of Dumbledore’s office, and their own much smaller spires began to take shape as well. This was all slightly complicated by the fact that what few technical drawings I could find were not quite accurate, but I think I got pretty close in the end.

Here’s where I ran into a conundrum, though. As I mentioned, the closeup shots in GOF were accomplished with larger miniatures built just for those shots. As I looked more closely, I realized that the design of these turrets is a little different in these miniatures than in the main miniature – mainly in the design and placement of the windows. I couldn’t decide at first whether to go with the more detailed alternate design seen in GOF (and the theme park versions) or just go off of the main 1:24 model. The former was tempting at first, since the changes were clearly done to help the exterior match the interior sets designed for Chamber of Secrets. Speaking of which, as massive as this whole tower is, Dumbledore’s office is actually still smaller than the actual set. I thought that was pretty interesting. Below is a very simplified version of the interior set (in white) next to the exterior, using the real-world scale of the set and the intended imaginary scale of the exterior. (The vertical protrusions on the right are where the windows are; they didn’t build the sets with full-thickness walls, so they look like they’re sticking out.)

Anyway, the main model’s design won out in the end, and you can see the corresponding simple window designs have been added here. I’m technically still working on the POA version, and the redesigned exterior wasn’t created till GOF; when I get to GOF, I’m sure I’ll build the redesigned version too.

That makes the spire more or less complete, although I may go back in and add in details like roof flashing where Dumbledore’s turrets meet the main spire. For now, I moved on to the main body of the tower, adding corbels and windows:

From there, it was just a matter of building the larger windows that cover the rest of the tower below! In studying my 16,000-pixel-tall collage of reference images for this tower, I noticed that the spire has actually been mounted on the tower at a variety of angles over time, and there were again some discrepancies between the actual model and the technical drawings. This made it harder to figure out the radial spacing of the windows, but in the end, I did some measurements on my old photogrammetry of the castle and settled on there being 18 windows on each floor. Hopefully that’s correct, haha. In any case, here’s the complete tower!

As I continue around this corner of the castle, we’ll next be proceeding to the only other feature that’s as visually important as the marble staircase tower: the Great Hall!

POA Hogwarts – South Wall of Quad Building

Still focusing exclusively on the Prisoner of Azkaban version of the castle. I’ve continued working my way counterclockwise (anticlockwise, to Harry and his Brit friends) around the quad building. The south wall is now complete.

If some of this architecture looks pretty unfamiliar, there’s a good reason for that: you never get a good look at this wall in the films, at least in this design iteration. Finding adequate references for the buttresses and the arch-shaped depression was quite a challenge, and there’s still a bit of guesswork on some of the details, but it should be pretty accurate. The tracery on the windows between the buttresses was particularly tough…there are no closeup shots of these that I can find anywhere, and they vanished in OOTP, so it’s not like you can go photograph them on the miniature in the Warner Bros. Studio Tour. But I lucked out and discovered that the same window design was used inside the quad (AKA paved courtyard) in the OOTP video game, and that provided some good reference. (Speaking of windows, the windows in this render really show how hollow the quad building is right now. Eventually, I’ll have everything filled in so you’re not looking straight through from one side of the building to the other.)

It’s a short post for today, but that’s just because I want to be able to devote the next post to the major element I’m working on this evening: the castle’s main tower, variously known as the marble staircase tower, the turris magnus, or Dumbledore’s tower. I’ve had a very simple version of the tower in there since the start of the model, but now it’s time to get all the details in there. More soon!

Night Falls on Hogwarts

I liked that fire material from the last post so much that I kept finding myself virtually lighting the torches and switching to that day-for-night setup. Eventually, I got wise and decided to create a dedicated “night mode” for the model. It has a different HDRI for the background (a cloudy daytime scene from HDRIhaven.com that I made much darker and bluer), stylized blue lighting to match the moonlit shots in the first couple films, and interior lights behind some of the windows. Compare:

Best of all, I realized I could use Blender’s node group functionality to create a single slider that would allow me to change all the different settings between day and night simultaneously. I also did the same for the two color modes (the warmer look of the first two films, and the desaturated look of the later films, seen above).

Both tasks were made easier by some behind-the-scenes organizing I’d been doing. The procedural (algorithmic) brick texture on all the walls had gotten really complicated, because I was layering so many different elements together in the pursuit of a realistic and visually pleasing result. For kicks, I thought I’d share what the brick material’s node tree looked like before:

Each of those little gray boxes (nodes) is a set of calculations, receiving inputs and sending outputs via those light gray lines that connect them to other nodes. I’d organized them into those colorful groups, each of which has a descriptive label, but it was still a pretty ugly setup and not that easy to use or “read.” Here’s the same material after visually organizing the node tree a little better:

Not only does this look cooler, but it’s a lot easier for me to just jump in and make changes or additions where needed. (Which I’ve already done repeatedly since taking that screenshot…the setup is even more complicated now, but still nicely organized.)

You might have noticed that long wall at the bottom right of day/night renders, connected to a small tower. These new additions will barely be seen in the final version of the POA model – they were part of the original model from the first film, but starting in Azkaban, the landscape became much hillier and it literally swallowed up most of the wall and the entirety of that tower. But I decided to build the whole thing now so that it would be easier to create the versions for the first two films when the time comes. Here’s another shot:

There’s also some work happening here on that wall beneath the hospital wing bridge, just to the right of Gryffindor Tower in this image. Here, let’s take a closer look with the clock tower and hospital wing temporarily hidden, and some improved texturing on the roofs and spires:

Windows, dormers, drainpipes, corbels, the whole nine yards. That wall is done now, and you can even see some work happening on the tower on the right. Fast-forward a bit, and here’s a closeup of that tower, now complete as well:

Some of this geometry was definitely tricky to get right, but it was worth it in the end. I also had a lot of fun with the decorative elements near the top – there’s a triquetra near the top of each dormer, plus some sort of decorative plaque just below. I couldn’t quite figure out what is embossed in the plaque, so I just sculpted something that looked similar and baked it as a normal map. [EDIT 4/24/19: I finally found a clear enough photo of the plaque – it’s the Hufflepuff crest! Guess I’ll have to go in and redo it at some point…] You can also see the new diamond-shaped muntins in the windows, which are now in all the windows of the castle so far. (I admit that I didn’t go procedural with these…I briefly tried, but it just seemed more efficient to use a single diamond image that I could tile all over the glass.)

Taking a closer look, though, the roof shingles aren’t supposed to get flattened out in some places like that. Always more to be done!