Puzzling Places - Portable Blender · published
Hey everyone,
In this post, we will give you a small peek at how we prepare and fix real-world 3D scans to create puzzles for our game. Now let’s see how one of our puzzles, The Football Night, looked at first.
And Kickoff!
Once we’ve found a scan one of the first things we have to decide is how to crop the model. A lot of scans come in with unclean edges, or large areas, that don’t have a lot going on visually or are very flat and are therefore not so fun to puzzle. Here’s how we cropped the Stadium:
For the crop, we usually try to focus the puzzle on the interesting bits, cutting out the boring areas, so that the parts that make up the main motif end up having the most pieces.
Of course we also give the puzzle a clean edge, that way it’s easier to know where the puzzle starts and ends.
This is one of the more time consuming (and at times tedious ; ) ) parts of the process, depending on the scan. For fixing we usually split it into two parts: First off, fixing the model. In this step, we look for holes, scanning artifacts, and anything else that might look weird.
A common example is “bags” found on the inside of the mesh. Removing them is often necessary, especially if they are large enough that they might become pieces themselves, or if they connect two areas to each other, that shouldn’t be.
The before and after can be very satisfying.
Once we’ve fixed the problematic parts of the model, it’s on to fixing the texture, making it look clean, and most importantly making sure that it can be puzzled as best as possible. The sky is the limit with fixing but in general our main focus is always making sure that a puzzle is, of course, fun to puzzle.
Using Blender’s Paint Tools, Photoshop, and a bit of dark magic, we clean up any areas that just don’t look right and make it look as real and plausible as possible, which is hardest in areas where little to no information is available from the original.
With the fixing done the puzzle is almost ready to go. In the last step we either tweak the colors to be as vibrant and appealing as they can be, or we go all in on art direction, creating a specific mood or theme. The Football Night is an example of both. Where the Night Version features a completely different look and feel, the day version simply enhances the existing colors in the scan.
Our puzzles have so much more to offer, but it all starts with the foundation. Preparing and fixing.
Keep an eye out for more posts here if you want even more behind the scenes insights — and as always, we’re happy if you give it a try. Happy Puzzling 🧩✨
— The Realities.io Team