Ben Parker (brdparker on flickr) has posted a great collection of waterbomb tessellations recently- 132 photos, in all! Ben says this is all part of a tutorial/write-up on waterbomb based tessellations, which I am eagerly looking forward to reading. Quite a few of us on Flickr have been folding all sorts of waterbomb-esque tessellation things in the last few months, although the real breakthroughs with this sort of technique comes from the “flagstone” tessellations of Joel Cooper, who has been creating magnificent works of art in this style for years. It is only recently that others of us have been able to sort out some of the methods of this type of construction, and of course we all seem to have approached it from different ways. Many of the pieces posted here by Ben are not flagstone tessellations, following the intricate style popularized by Joel (great example here), but instead some interesting 3D pieces that remind me a lot of the work of Polly Verity and Ray Schamp. Also, I see a bit of Frank …

Irregular Flagstone – Front Originally uploaded by Owesen. Ray Schamp gave me a heads up on this – Fredrik Owesen posted a fantastic design, made up of completely random polygons tiled in a flagstone pattern. This has long been something I have wanted to see, and I am not surprised at all to see it coming from Fredrik- he’s a source of many new ideas, and I know he’s been working a lot of randomized folding in the last few months. For technical details: I’m just making some guesses here, but I think he used his unique “random folding from base polygons” technique, and then squashed the resulting pleats in half to create double pleats between each polygon. This seems pretty tricky, mostly because generating the twists for such intersections cleanly can be difficult! He alludes to this in the comments, in reference to very small angles, and very large angles (that approach 180 degrees) and how that results in huge triangles that are very narrow, etc. But my Voronoi tessellation loving heart just can’t …

I had the great pleasure of finally meeting Ralf Konrad at the 2006 CDO convention in Verbania, Italy. (Actually, going to meet him was the main reason I went there in the first place!) He posted a great write up of the convention on his site- in German- which I can’t read, and the babelfish isn’t so great at translating. Much thanks to Peter (Syngola on flickr) for translating it to English for us monolinguistic Americanos! Read the English version on Ralf Konrad’s website. Thanks Ralf! I hope to see you again soon! Ralf Konrad, myself, and Mélisande at the CDO convention, 2006

I saw this amazing sliceform torus on YouTube, thanks to a link from Jorge Jaramillo (commented on this great set of sliceforms by Joan Michaels Paque.) I shouldn’t be browsing around Flickr, as I’m on a self-imposed Flickr hiatus, but Sunday’s a day of rest, so I treated myself to a few minutes of browsing 🙂 The coolest part of the video is the way the model folds flat and pops back into 3D! The creator of this fantastic sliceform says this, on the YouTube commentary: This torus has been made as a Sliceform. It is a paper model made from two sets of slices of the torus. It folds flat because the intersection of each set of slices acts as a hinge. The slices are cut so that one set includes the Villarceau circles. For more on Sliceforms do a web search with Google. See www.tarquinbooks.com for books of models to cut out and ways to explore the mathematics of surfaces using Sliceforms. Check it out, it’s worth a look. Lots of great people …