First I made the normal Pyramid with extrude and inset.
Edge loops on a pyramid was interesting, duplicating them ended up with all sorts of trouble. Had to make them individually and make sure they were straight. then move to position for the steps.
That only took a few min…so decided on making the base more detailed then duplicating and scaling up, adding stairs and top.
Went with the El Castillo one because most detailed image
Base.
Unfortunately this one is a fail, after all my cladding and beveling I totally lost the angle of the walls, trying to correct makes it worse.
Serpent
Adding the feathered serpent was great - tried to put the “monkey” eye in it, but had a mild epiphany “The geometry IS the detail” You don’t add things, you just create with the edges and verts.
The eye is quite interesting, as the overhang creates the pupil with its shadow.
Then another failure - don’t know how to mirror yet, so ended up copying / moving Eye to other side then joining it to geometry, many duplicated verts/edges to clean up.
Tried to add something that looks like a spiral, not sure if that worked.
The corner of the mouth, where the spiral joins, is still not right, but I moved on 
Looks like a Proteroglyphous Snake - You don’t become a Snake God without fear, so added the broken fangs back. (Added eight of these Kukulcán around the base, probably was only two or four.)
Stairs - this looks hard.
Nope it was easy - there is a archimesh addon, only difficult bit was getting angle right, due to previous mistakes, stairs sides ended up being fudged at the top - ie should be no flat area on top step sides.
Top - Easy to do and very quick, little messing with the face but looks about right.
No idea on what was on top of those pillars so just put a blob there for now.
Doorway - Ended up putting this in, making the slatted wooden door was hard, had to learn the knife project to cut out the slats then reface the holes - there has to be a quicker more precise way of doing this.
Notes:
Adding that bevel modifier was a bit of a mistake, made loads of issues - but I learnt a lot fixing them.
Using vertex snapping when fixing and use the G key to move, not the axis arrows.
Don’t use the monkey eye for a snake statue.
Subdivide to add verts, or Knife across faces.
Too many verts - select them all and AltM to combine them.
Too many Edges - select it and X then limited dissolve.
Always think out items you can duplicate, make sure they are finished first!
Learn mirroring.
Lots of Aha moments, When you realise you can do the same thing in a fraction of the time, as you’ve just discovered a better way to do it.
Awesome, just been using the normal spike lines, to show me the angle the face is facing…
I doubt the idea was to spent a week on doing this challenge, but I seem to learn by messing up then finding ways to do it. This course is giving me the structure and impudence er I mean impetus to continue.
Don’t know if I should be proud the number of steps is correct, or worried
As you read all that, here
- seems it has more errors once exported and uploaded, oh well.
