Maker Minute #2

Making a jigsaw puzzle for the Epilog Fusion Pro with Inkscape - Part 2 (of 3) - Making the jigsaw puzzle in Inkscape

Now that you have installed the extension for the jigsaw puzzle into Inkscape it's time to create our puzzle!

Open up Inkscape and click on Extensions in the menu bar. Choose Render, Jigsaw Puzzle Generator to get started.

Quick descriptions of the options:

Seed: if not 0, used as the seed of the random number generator so a puzzle with the same settings should result in the same design.
Width/Height: size of puzzle in millimeters.
Tiles across/high: number of puzzle pieces.
Size of tabs (%): size of the tabs as a percentage of the tile size.
Randomeness factor (%): maximum amount to randomize the design - again as a percent of the tile
Randomness factor for intersections: This is a multiplier on the randomness factor (so 0 is no effect, 2 is twice the effect) for moving the path intersections around. The bigger the number here, the more irregular the pieces will be. NOTE: This can easily go horribly wrong. A randomness % of 10% and multiplier of 5 will make a mess. The more you use this, the more you need to look closely at the resulting paths to watch for overlaps.

2. Once you have the settings configured as you want them click on Apply. You may get some warning messages but you can safely ignore them.

3. Click OK to get rid of the warning messages.

4. Your layout will most likely have to be modified in order to get your puzzle to fit on the canvas in Inkscape. The first thing I did was to change my canvas to be in landscape mode by clicking on:

File -> Document Properties -> Landscape Mode

Then I adjusted the Width and Height to be slightly larger than my actual Puzzle (all measurements are in millimeters by default). The puzzle was 300 x 200 mm so I made my canvas 350 x 250 mm.

Video Tutorial

Click here to go to the next tutorial - Maker Minute #3 - Preparing your jigsaw puzzle to be laser cut on the Epilog Fusion Pro

if you want to learn how to add a raster image to your jigsaw puzzle please take a look at this, advanced tutorial - Maker Minute #4 - Adding a Raster image to your Epilog Fusion Pro project. (coming soon)

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