Origami Tessellations

• Flickr Leech
  Andrew Houser is my favorite person for today! He published this awesome tool that allows you to browse huge quantities of flickr images at a shot, by tag, username, interestingness, etc. Great work, Andrew!
  (tags: flickr browse leech thumbnails photos hack flickrhack houser)

Continuing with the ideas of using negative space to form shapes, I tried to fold a traditional 5-pointed star. This required figuring out a few things, and to make life significantly easier for me I created a pretty simple crease pattern to use. However, a lot of the fold relationships with pentagons aren’t as easy to work out, and things don’t fold out to be easy distances like 1:2; with pentagons, they are primarily 1:1.6…, or 1/phi. I love the number Phi, and it’s really a fantastic thing, but folding it isn’t as easy! I’m sharing this example just to show it’s certainly possible, and hopefully to spur some other people on to see what they can do with the same sorts of ideas.

Here’s some photos of what I was working on; the backlit image has one corner which is folded differently, to illustrate the same kind of concept I used on my 6 sided stars. figuring out where to put all the creases was pretty tricky, although if I was doing it again it would be simpler. It’s definitely all about reference creases and lines.

And here’s the crease pattern I was using- it’s really more of a reference line sheet, than anything else. But it’s available to download if you’re interested.

• VoroGlide – interactive Voronoi Tessellation applet
  This is exactly what I was looking for- a voronoi tessellation applet that allows you to move the points around and see how shapes change and interact in realtime. It also shows you the DeLaunay triangulations for each point, which are critical to use as
  (tags: voronoi tessellations applet voroglide java math software)
• Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations
  information on Voronoi tessellations that are more “normalized”, and are more useful for my purposes. some interesting concepts here to exploit.
  (tags: voronoi tessellations CVT centroidal geometry math)

negative stars tile

Originally uploaded by origami joel.

Joel folded these beautiful star patterns, using the “negative space” concept. A departure from his normal methods, he says, but his folding techniques and skill are unparalleled- these look amazing.

check out the backlit photo:

• voronoi : Built with Processing
  another spiffy Voronoi tessellation applet, this time built with the magnificent Processing framework. Thanks, Alex, for providing the source for this!
  (tags: voronoi yaxu tessellations tessellation processing applet)
• del.icio.us/ikomi
  a big collection of origami bookmarks on del.icio.us. Thanks Iko!
  (tags: origami bookmarks del.icio.us)