Origami Tessellations

light of tesselation

Originally uploaded by bigk2356.

New photos in the Origami Tessellations photo pool on flickr!

These are from relative flickr newcomer (but long-time commentator on this blog) Kevin!

This is one of my favorite tessellation patterns, which he has discovered himself and folded in a new way- I like his layout of the pleats! The backlit photos are great, but it also looks quite good from the top with normal lighting- the flaps look like overlapping leaves (thanks for the good words on that, Ryan).

Thanks, Kevin, for posting these to the OT group and sharing your artistic creations with us!

Hexakaidecagon 1/4 view. a study in crease assignment.

Originally uploaded by EricGjerde.

Folding a hexakaidecagon (16 sided shape). It creates a necessarily large central shape. I don’t have the folding chops to make this central space into something more interesting, in a Chris Palmer sort of way, but we’ll find something to do with it eventually.

the changing pleats radiating outwards are kind of like mysterious tangents to an unseen circle, which necessarily makes them a little dififcult to fold. However for the time being I found a “solution” which is imperfect but really makes the folding a lot easier, overall. I’ll probably fold a larger one using this shortcut method and then apply the proper collapse technique I figured out this weekend to do it correctly, if there is such a thing.

16 sides yields several levels of tangled triangular shapes, rather than a simple array of “kites”, so there’s some fiddling that needs to be done for this to all fold properly. What you, the viewer, might not see is that some of the tiniest folds around the hexakaidecagon are fudged; figuring out how to fold it was a little difficult. hopefully the next time around will be a bit cleaner.

So, there’s been a little ongoing conversation on Flickr the last few days talking about how long it takes you to precrease a sheet of paper with a triangular grid. Taking off from that point, it branched out a little bit into how we go about the actual folding process.

Ryan (the one who started this conversation!) just posted his folding process, here.

I’ve just changed my normal folding process to utilize a method that I saw in one of Fujimoto’s books; I had to make some guesses, but I think I figured it out so it’s roughly the same. I posted a series of photos detailing the folding process which works pretty well; however, I also recorded a quick video and uploaded it to Youtube.com. You can click on the embedded video below and view the 4:30 movie, if you want more details.

Seven Points of Love

Originally uploaded by Ori-gomi.

Folded this heptagonal star from some radial line grids- the rest is folded by guesstimation. I’ve been practicing this type of folding a lot lately, trying to get some better folding ability. I’m still not very good, but I’m getting better at it- it’s just going to take time, and that’s OK. Patience with these things is important. it’s all about having fun in the process.

I like the way it looks, I just wish I could figure out a way to fold a centralized heptagon in a sheet of paper without needing printed guidelines.

This is from a series of items generated by a script I had laying around- more posting on that later.

-Eric