The next additions to the Goblet of Fire castle were the “pepperpot” and the foundations of the viaduct courtyard:
I like that angle!
Next, I moved back around the backside of the Great Hall to begin adding the quad building. The south wall was changed in GOF – a new archway acts as another entry into the quad itself.
Speaking of the quad interior, check out this POA/GOF before-and-after:
I should reiterate that some parts of this are a little speculative…I don’t know for sure that the lower floor, the cloisters, and the fountain were still there in POA. But the best evidence seems to point toward that being the case. And as a reminder, the balustrade toward the bottom left in the POA version is pretty speculative too. And of course, if you’ve played the video games a lot, the lack of cloisters on the right might look pretty weird, but as far as I can tell they never came back after POA.
I’m starting to notice an interesting shift in myself. I’ve tended to think of myself as having an especially big soft spot for the first few castle designs. But as I move the virtual camera around my growing model of the GOF castle, I’m appreciating its aesthetic more and more. It holds up really well from a lot of angles. They did a really good job of choosing camera angles that flatter the earlier castle designs, obscuring some of the clunkier elements. But the GOF castle doesn’t really have many bad angles to begin with.
Anyway, here you can see me preparing to add the viaduct:
And now with the viaduct in place:
It may seem like that would be a simple matter of dropping in the existing viaduct, but it actually took some effort. The switch from the Chamber of Reception to the courtyard causes the whole viaduct to swivel a little, and I had to compress it a bit to fit the new angle. I wonder if the original modelmakers had to rebuild the whole viaduct from scratch or if they were able to squeeze the original viaduct into that space somehow?
Anyway, my next move was to drop in a whole bunch of stuff from the POA model that didn’t change for GOF, creating a much more complete castle:
As part of those efforts, I also finally added a missing detail at the base of the Dark Tower – a little entry stairwell that’s hard to find shots of. Here’s my best attempt at bringing it to life, based on the available information:
The main elements the GOF castle still needs are the owlery, the boathouse steps, and the terrain. Saving those for a future post!
Hogwarts 4D 
I do like the new arch and path leading up to it, but I do wish it hadn’t come at the expense of losing that lovely lower cloister courtyard. I suppose you could throw in another balustrade to reconcile the two designs hypothetically, but it might also work to go for a film5/film6 video game style walkway on top of the cloister connecting the arches, or just raise the cloister to arche evel and poke a hole in the cloister where the big one is.
How would you go about integrating the two versions. Not asking you to go out of your way to build it or anything, just a creative exercise, roughly what would be your design approach?
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Could you show an angle of the part of the pepperpot that you’d view from the great hall balustrade some time? The part where you can see the dormer and the connecting part between it and the great hall, I’m quite qurious to see how you did it.
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