Angel/Demon Puzzle

cults3d

This brain teaser displays an angel or a demon depending on how you set up its pieces. As a puzzle is hardly challenging (it's only 3 pieces!), but it makes for a great conversation starter to leave on your coffee table. Place it carefully next to your copy of GQ magazine (or whatever people use today to impress visitors) then pretend nonchalantly that you didn't notice it was there until your visitors ask about it. This trick works every time! The puzzle is based on M.C. Escher's "Circle Limit IV" mosaic design. In that art piece, angels and demons fill the hyperbolic space. I reprojected the motif to planar Euclidean space and extracted a hexagonal tesselating unit. By splitting the unit tile carefully, an angel or demon can then be composed simply by rearranging the pieces. To complete the model, I included a tray to hold its pieces. There's a hole at the back so you can push out the pieces if they fit too tightly together. The gap between the parts is about 0.4mm, which should be suitable for most printers. This project was actually quite labor-intensive. Preprocessing Escher's motif using Photoshop, then vectorizing with Illustrator took some time. Exporting the vectors to Fusion360 and building up the puzzle parts there also required a lot of effort. The STL coming out of 360 wasn't watertight, so I had to clean it up using MeshLab and Blender. What a relief! Enjoy this brain teaser! P.S.: This Angel/Demon puzzle was my entry for the MakeAnything Puzzle Design Challenge. You can see the entry model online.