The Enigma3 project began as an assignment in high school. The class was World History and we were studying the Renaissance. The assignment was to create something that conveyed the spirit of that era and to explain the project to the class.
I first designed the cube in March of 1995 and never figured it would be resurrected eight years later. I recall the hardest part of the project was cutting equal sized cubes. The next step was assembling the cube. Making sure I could reassemble the cube meant there would be instructions or an assembly guide of some kind.
The first iteration of my assembly guide was drawn by hand. The best part of this project was what my teacher, Mrs. Morris, said to me. She was watching a student for detention and, apparently, earlier in the day someone bumped the cube and it fell apart. What better way to spend detention than putting together a puzzle? After class the next day, Mrs. Morris told me that the student successfully reconstructed the cube using my assembly guide.
In my idle time I recently took apart the cube. After reinstalling Merlin VR 1.0, the 3D-modeling equivalent to Microsoft Paint, I started to render my instructions in 3D. After many saves and screen shots, the result was good but not great. Actually, the cube itself is not perfectly symmetrical so I guess an imperfect 3D rendering is fitting.
Some images of the real and virtual pieces:
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