If you are interested in converting a model you made by hand or found online into a puzzle, there are a few things you need to keep in mind.

https://youtu.be/X0qXLrV86o4

Checklist:

• Puzzle Maker expects a single mesh with continuous topology. It looks for the largest chunk and deletes any floating faces.
  • If vertices overlap, merge them to connect the mesh.
  • Connect everything beforehand, either by hand or by ensuring there is more than a single face connecting parts.
  • Use a remesher for more complicated scenes. This requires a new UV unwrap and baking the textures.
• Puzzles in Puzzling Places use a single 8k texture. All lighting and effects are baked into this texture, which is rendered with an unlit material. You cannot have transparency, metallic or mirror-like surfaces, or special effects. There is no real-time lighting or PBR. If you have PBR materials or any material with a special shader, you need to bake everything down to albedo textures that include the full look.
• You can import a mesh into Puzzle Maker with several materials, and each material can have its own texture. A “single texture” means that, in the end, each material needs to reference one texture containing all colors. Our pipeline bakes everything into a single 8k texture anyway, so for easier baking, I recommend baking everything to a single material and one 8k texture ahead of time.
• Puzzle Maker uses Blender’s automated unwrap anyway, so don’t worry about creating perfect UVs. You can keep very little distance between islands, since we set the final padding and Puzzle Maker doesn’t care about it.
• We decimate the models ourselves, so don’t worry about optimizing triangle count. This also means very thin, fine details may be lost during the decimation process. Keep in mind that a very large model might take too many resources on your PC to process.
• Make sure your mesh is exported so the texture is referenced correctly. Puzzle Maker looks for the unlit texture referenced in the material. In OBJ format, for example, this is the map_Kd texture. How to export correctly depends on your application. In Blender, for example, plug your texture into the Base Color of a Principled BSDF node, and connect that to the Material Output. When exporting an FBX or OBJ this way, Blender will correctly reference your texture. Common pitfalls are:
  • Using a complicated shader setup that makes it unclear which texture should be referenced.
  • Referencing your texture in the wrong slot (not the albedo or base color), which will cause Puzzle Maker to not know what to use.
  • Not exporting the texture with the mesh during the export step. 3D applications have additional checkboxes for this.
  • Referencing the texture with an absolute path in the material and then moving files, which breaks the link. During export, it is best to copy textures next to the file and reference them with relative paths. GLTF embeds textures.
• If your mesh includes animations or special rendering tricks (like outlines through backface culling), you need to resolve all of that into a single static mesh.
• Coordinate System: The rotation applied to your mesh matters for the puzzle. In 2D, the axes are constrained, so rotate the mesh so it is upright, then apply the transforms. In Puzzle Maker uses a, right-handed, Y-up coordinate system,matching Scaniverse’s coordinate system (X → right, Y → up, Z → forward toward viewer). Check your application’s coordinate system. For example, Blender is Y forward and Z up.
• Crop the mesh in a way that is fun to puzzle.
• Double-check the license of the mesh you are using. MIT, CC Attribution, Public Domain, and many other licenses are good. Non-commercial licenses are okay as long as you are not earning money from this. Avoid Educational Only unless you are making an educational puzzle. Look up the relevant license for more info.