Work continues on the Prisoner of Azkaban iteration of Hogwarts! I guess my return to the project might have legs.
(Forgive the exposed interior glow panels on the right again.)
With the Chamber of Reception complete, I moved on to the terraces or balconies surrounding the Great Hall, plus the foundations below. Good lord, the geometry of these corbels gave me a headache as I tried to reconcile a variety of imprecise measurements and calculations. I’m pretty happy with how they turned out, though. And I sure was thrilled when the spacings of the corbels and the torches lined up! I added the finishing touches to the pepperpot as well.
This also afforded the opportunity to check out some angles not seen in the films, such as this nighttime view looking toward the head of the Great Hall from the balcony outside:
Soon I was faced once again with that perennial question: what next? At first I considered doing the crenelations outside the Chamber of Reception and the steps down to the boathouse, but as I assembled reference images, I found myself drawn to the boathouse itself.
It’s a simple structure with a lot of good reference out there, since it never changed till the digital rebuild of the castle for Deathly Hallows (when it was completely redesigned), and visitors to the Warner Bros. Studio Tour can get quite close to that part of the model. As a result, it came together pretty quickly. Here it is in complete form:
I really like that last one. I wanted the boathouse to “pop” in front of the similarly-colored castle behind it, so I went with a shallow depth of field and ended up with this render that kinda looks like a miniature itself. You can even see the witch-and-black-cat weather vane at the top. And, as I mentioned last time, I finally got a decent stone floor texture going, though I’ll probably still tweak that some more.
Next up…the boathouse steps, I suppose? Speaking of which, it just occurred to me that the first-years have to climb the height of a 14-story building to get from the boathouse to the Great Hall for their Sorting. Between that and the nerves, it’s amazing they all manage to stay on their feet.
Hogwarts 4D 
Just discovered this blog today and it’s amazing! This has got to be the most accurate model of the castle so far. I have always wanted to do a project like this however my limited knowledge in 3D modelling prevents me from doing so. None the less I have pondered for years over pictures of the castle and spent many times wondering how the interiors could possibly match up with the exteriors. (DADA classroom has given me many a sleepless night) anyway I can’t wait to see this project finished and it will be incredibly satisfying when it’s done. I love it!
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Beautiful renders and great work so far! Your work has been so accurate and the end result is going to look incredible, revealing more unseen angles of the model!
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Imagine heading to Astronomy class as a Slytherin…
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Joe, I have such a weird question. Can you show us what the back of the Great Hall balcony looks like? I’m just curious where the link building next to the tower ends, and the balcony’s corbels begin. Is it just buried in the rock or did you build a straight wall there? In later models, the link building becomes larger and contiguous with Great Hall itself so that structure behind the corbels will disappear.
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I unfortunately don’t have an answer about where exactly that wall is in the early models. I picked a fairly arbitrary place under there, kinda based off of the width of the link building in the later models, but I’ve never found any reference for that, sadly. 😦
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That’s what I figured; it’s what I’d do anyway. I imagine the footprint is similar to the old POA plan before that balcony was added north of the Hall.
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