Our algorithmic puzzle technique lets us “grow” the puzzle pieces around your whimsies and within your puzzle shape.Ĭhoose from 3 different cut styles: Amoeba, Dendrite, and Maze. This allows you to artfully arrange your pieces or insert a hidden personal message. Select from our growing catalog of whimsy pieces shaped like recognizable creatures (from cats to narwhals), objects (space shuttles to crystals), and letters. Wish someone happy birthday with a cake puzzle! Make a puzzle of your cat, shaped like a cat, with cat pieces in it! You are no longer limited to rectangular or circular puzzles-you can design your own shape. You can personalize every aspect of the puzzle, including the image, shape, and whimsy pieces. We open up that process to you with our new and improved custom puzzle maker. Instead of having our puzzles mass-produced, we make them all in-house with code and a laser cutter, allowing each one to be one of a kind. This one was a little too detailed, resulting in giant, overly fragile pieces. Right: Another early Maze puzzle cut experiment. Left: The very first Maze cut experiments as teeny tiny puzzles! The one on the upper right is on a rectangular grid vs. (Disclaimer: Maze style not actually a maze.) The rods grow, lengthening, until they collide, pushing each other into contorted shapes. Each rod wants to be straight but in the confined space of the puzzle, they are forced to bend as they grow. The edges of this pattern are turned into elastic rods. Starting from an initial point, the pieces expand, wrapping around the border and whimsy pieces, until they reach each other and fill the puzzle.įrom here, Maze diverges from our first puzzles. Each piece is its own chemical component, which actives its own production and inhibits everything else. The initial piece shapes grow via reaction diffusion. The Maze puzzle generation starts the same as our Dendrite system. We realized that in 2D, it would make interesting interlocking shapes. Originally, it was a 3D system for making expanding lattices using a technique called Position and Orientation Based Cosserat Rods -but that is a project for another time. However, it didn’t start out as a puzzle-making system. This new puzzle cut style is based on a simulation of growing elastic rods. When examined individually, the pieces almost look like strange glyphs from an alien alphabet. The pieces are so stretched and distorted that it can be hard to distinguish where one ends and another begins. After the viral infinity puzzle incident of 2016, we started thinking it was time to expand our puzzle offerings with a new cut style that featured a different kind of interlocking shape.įor that reason, we created a brand new process for generating jigsaw puzzles: Maze! It is our most intricate cut style, with almost twice the number of pieces as our other puzzles. The puzzle’s pieces grow into each other, interlocking with shapes similar to dendritic crystals or ice formations. We’ve been making puzzles since 2012 with a unique cut style we designed based on crystal formation. Maze: a new generative system for making puzzles Similar patterns are seen in tube agates where needle-like crystals of other minerals like goethite are present in the chamber and create additional surfaces for templating growth. We create these by introducing new seeds of growth during the generation process. The larger Orbicular Geode Puzzles ($95, ~370 pieces) feature zones of orbicular pattern, bubble-like disruptions in the bands. The different color families hail from specific geographic locales where the photos were taken, from the reefs of Bonaire to the coast of New England. The generated images are like slices of algorithmic rocks, each with its own unique shape and topography of layers that references an artificial geology. With each new band, we travel across the photo, sampling its color. Our agates derive their colors from a pool of photographs, all taken by Jessica. Real agates get their colors from dissolved impurities (mostly oxidized iron) which are present in the silica gel (or later infiltrate). Each band of growth exhibits slight changes in growth rate, color, and character, resulting in a unique pattern. Then we progressively grow the edge inward, perpendicular to the boundary, until the chamber is filled. First, we grow a chamber (this will be the shape of the puzzle). Our computer generated agates emerge from a similar process. Concentric layers of mineral deposition create colorful bands as the chemical composition of the silica gel changes. It begins to crystallize from the outside in, with a layer forming first against the chamber wall. Under the right conditions, this silica solidifies into a microcrystalline gemstone called agate. Bubbles of gas leave pockets in the rock which fill with a silica-rich solution. Agates typically form in voids within volcanic stone.
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