The Boathouse Steps Aren’t THAT Stupid

Okay, after some massaging, I’ve gotten the photogrammetry meshes to line up a little better. This is always tricky because:

1. The photogrammetry isn’t precise down to the millimeter – depending on the source images, the model can end up a little skewed.
2. The technical drawings aren’t super precise either – for most areas, I don’t have detail drawings, only the overall floor plan.
3. When lining up one photogrammetry mesh with another, you might need to adjust any or all of the following:
   • overall scale
   • x translation
   • y translation
   • z translation
   • x rotation
   • y rotation
   • z rotation

So, bottom line…these things aren’t as precise as one could wish, and you have to decide which which sources to trust, and that can vary from area to area.

Anyway, the adjusted photogrammetry confirms that different flights of the Half-Blood Prince boathouse steps (which are the same as in the previous two films) do indeed have different slopes, which is why my vertical dimensions weren’t working very well. In fact, to get everything to fit, I had to give almost every flight a slightly different slope. This seems awfully messy, but it also provides the best fit to the actual miniature.

That’s all being put on hold for now, though – I just discovered more reference photos that are helping me fill in areas that were otherwise difficult to reconstruct. In particular, I finally know what the original “link building” looks like! (That’s the small connection between the Great Hall/Chamber of Reception structure and the marble staircase tower; it changed to a different design after Azkaban.) So while I don’t have any renders to share for this post, I think the next one will cover the link building and the front of the quad building!

P.S. For the record, the boathouse steps themselves are actually a great design, beautifully executed in all three incarnations. I just get frustrated when I can’t get my sources of info to agree with each other, haha.