Harry Potter: The Blueprints

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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!

These floor plans of every level of Hogwarts castle, researched and created by Harper Robinson, take the the tiniest of details from the books into account — read Harper’s notes below and be amazed — as well as the standard structure and architecture of castles over the centuries. While not canon, this map is certainly one of the most well-researched and historically accurate blueprints of Hogwarts that anyone could create. Moving from the castle’s ground floor to its highest peaks, I started playing around with tower size and placement, since these will greatly impact the overall look and layout of the castle. I experimented in both 2D and 3D, again allowing for extreme roughness:That flat lawn texture doesn’t look horrible from a distance, but it’s pretty obvious that there’s no actual grass here when you get close like this. So I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a while: I used Blender’s relatively new geometry nodes feature to create actual blades of grass. A: To enhance the exterior beauty of Hogwarts in Minecraft you should make sure that it has an exact structural facade as seen on screen. You can also consider adorning it with different elements like water bodies, bridges, fences and more. Make sure that these details are accurate so that your castle looks lifelike when completed. But you don’t need to be an architecture nerd to appreciate this stunning collection of sketches and blueprints. There’s also plenty of in-depth commentary from the production team, including production designer Stuart Craig and set decorator Stephenie McMillan, and it’s a fascinating read. You’ll learn everything from where they sourced design inspiration to details about building materials to how the production team integrated newly-built set pieces with historic buildings for on-location shoots. So far, we can locate the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw common room very accurately based on Hogwarts blueprints and ingame images:

That said, besides the incredible art and the crew commentary, Harry Potter: The Blueprints is a model-maker’s dream. Many drafts contain precise dimensions and close-up views of prop details from every angle — including the detailing on the giant chess set’s weaponry, the minuscule silver finishing on Slughorn’s hourglass, and more. While you (probably) couldn’t build yourself a life-sized Hogwarts just from the blueprints in this book, it’s an excellent starting point for recreating mini versions of the sets or even trying your hand at a Minecraft version.My second method was slightly more complicated: I read through narratives in which Harry and his friends travel from one place to another. If the book tells me that they go up a staircase and find a specific room halfway down the hallway on the right, then I noted that, and was sure to connect all rooms properly. Some narratives involved characters moving from one place to another, but had no clues as to the paths they took. In instances where there was dialogue, I read the words aloud and timed them. How far can Harry walk in, say, 51 seconds? How far in five minutes? I took all of these things into consideration. I’ll round out today’s post with some untextured orthographic views of the entire Prisoner of Azkaban model as of this moment. Coming along! Goblet of Fire is an interesting one. I do have one partial floor plan, but the whole Great Hall/boathouse area is all wrong, as is the quad interior. I suspect that one wasn’t the final revision either.