Okay, time to wrap up the fountain in the clock tower courtyard from Prisoner of Azkaban!
First up – finishing the statues. I believe the original Mexican symbology has the golden eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus, but the base of this statue appears to be a nondescript rock, and that’s what I’ve modeled it after. It was fun to glob that together with Blender’s “clay strips” sculpting brush; I also rigged and posed the eagle’s mouth and claws to hold the rattlesnake, whose body started as a squiggly Bezier curve with a circular cross-section. I enjoyed trying to match the sinuous, energetic gesture of the original.
The snake’s head was sculpted separately with its jaws already fully open…no need to worry about rigging and posing this fella. Good reference is scant for the head; as with the eagle, I relied on photos of real animals to help me fill in the gaps, but it was surprisingly hard to get a good “likeness.” Oh well…at least I planned out the retopology a little better than with the eagle. That enabled me to graft the head onto the body and bake a normal map from the head sculpt. He still looks kinda funky without fangs, but they appear to have been weathered away in the film.
With that, the only things remaining were integration with the main model and damage/erosion! Not too shabby-looking, right?
Integrating this into the main model ended up being very easy. There are four statues: one at each corner of the fountain. As I placed these, I spotted some angles and proportions that were a little off, but I suppose that’s the downside to working on the statue in its own file. Oh well. The complete fountain still looks pretty cool!
I suppose it’s a little misleading to describe the fountain as “complete” when it didn’t actually have…you know…a fountain…so let’s run some fluid simulation!
Not great, but it’ll do, especially because we won’t normally be this close.
The last step with this fountain was to destroy it a little. There are big chunks of it that have crumbled away. After creating some jagged meshes to cut these away with Boolean modifiers, I arrived (after over 2 weeks of on-and-off work) at the complete fountain!
Now it just needs a courtyard to surround it!
Hogwarts 4D 
It’s incredible to see the work and effort put into these little details. And the work has definitely paid off, wow that is looking amazing and certainly shows the dedication put into this project
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Hi! First of all: you are doing an amazing job. Really mindblowing. I’m currently working on a diorama (28mm) of the clock tower courtyard and I’m facing some trouble finding a proper model for these statues. Would it be too much to
ask you for the stl files of the egale with the snake? I would greatly appreciate it. I’m building the rest of the courtyard without the need of 3D printed parts, but the statues are a rather tricky part.
Thanks in advance and, again, amazing job.
Cheers!
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