Harry Potter: The Blueprints

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The onscreen appearance and imagined reality of the castle in the films (which is achieved through a mixture of location shoots, miniatures, CGI, etc.) I ended my last post on a positive note. Sadly, my enthusiasm was perhaps premature. As soon as I started adding windows to the viaduct entrance, I ran into the sorts of issues with dimensions and proportions that so often plague projects like this, at least when you don’t have complete technical drawings at your disposal. The top of window X is supposed to be even with the top of window Y, which is about a third as tall as window X, but if I move window X to be even with window Y, it’s no longer in the right place relative to feature Z…that sort of thing. Really frustrating. The towers are a particularly iconic part of the Hogwarts castle. In this video you’ll be giving the castle it’s unique look, adding the Headmaster’s Tower that houses Dumbledore’s office – a place Harry Potter visits on many occasions!

Once everything has been broken down into more manageable chunks, its time to start constructing elements of Hogwarts in Minecraft one by one until it is complete! Building Interior Structures For Hogwarts In Minecraft A few years ago I came across a footprint of Hogwarts, drawn by JK Rowling herself. Unfortunately, it looked like this: Harry meets Dobby again in the kitchens, where he gets bombarded by house elves carrying food and nearly hugged to death. The house elves prepare feasts hours in advance, and levitate the food to the tables above. Hermione tries on more than one occasion to spread the SPEW, but to no avail. Secrets and Spells

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One of my favorite details on these less prominent towers looks like something out of the Winchester Mystery House: a door that opens from the battered base of the tower into midair, with no balcony or stairs or anything, a good couple of stories above the ground. Take a look toward the bottom of the tower: Anyway, onward to today’s update. Let’s start fleshing out the remaining walls surrounding the training grounds! I’m kinda doing the COS version, since most of this is covered by a new hillside from POA onward, but that’s okay. Fortunately, I’m not as much of a perfectionist as I used to be, so I pressed onward, accepting the fact that close comparisons with the original Hogwarts miniature would still reveal small discrepancies. The overall dimensions are still very accurate – welllllllll beyond the accuracy needed for a casual viewer to be able to say, “Hey, that’s Hogwarts!” And thanks to the photogrammetry I’ve been able to pull from various videos of the castle, I shouldn’t end up with any errors that snowball into large-scale catastrophes. (Famous last words?) Whew, sorry for the long delay…the months of sitting at my home desk have taken their toll on my arms, and I’ve had to significantly limit my computer use. This will be a shorter post as a result. I’m starting physical therapy soon…if you’re feeling particularly generous and you want to help support my recovery, my Venmo handle is @Joe-Cardello, for what it’s worth. 🙂

We know the common room is close to the kitchens, and the kitchens are right uner the great hall. In fact, I think we saw the secret entrance to the kitchens in the Hufflepuff common room video tour: If these Slytherin locations are correct, that must mean there is quite some depth going on in this castle. Just look at the space (depth wise) between the buildings above the ground and where the Slytherin common room should be. This is insane! The castle will be huge if all this underground space will be used!

Hogwarts Castle Build Part 3: Paper Mache and Paint

So far, we can locate the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw common room very accurately based on Hogwarts blueprints and ingame images: