Latest Posts

Star by Shuzo Fujimoto

Published by ericgjerde

Logarithmic Star by Shuzo Fujimoto

I uploaded two crease patterns and some basic info on a star design by Shuzo Fujimoto; here’s my flickr post on the photo shown above.

I don’t really know what the title of this piece is; I saw a crease pattern in a book, and some basic illustrations of the finished design. This is my best effort at recreating the crease pattern and folding sequence, which I think comes out to be very close to Fujimoto’s finished design. I have no idea how he handled some of the collapses, so I did them in the method that makes the most sense to me.

This design is very similar to the star twist v2 I made a while back; this is actually the layout I had been trying to accomplish when I designed that piece. I knew it could be done, but the method has eluded me- and now I know that Fujimoto folded it back in 1976, two years before I was even born.

The folding on this model is really somewhat difficult- I actually folded a partial crease pattern first to get the methodology down, and figure out how I would do it; after that, it was pretty easy. Some of the steps seem illogical but make sense once you understand how it all works. I’d diagram it for you but I don’t particularly want to bring down the origami copyright nuts on my head, so you’re left to your own devices- but I’ll post the crease pattern. I’m not guaranteeing that it’s remotely accurate, but it works out for the pattern I folded here.

Diagram PDFs available here:

https://www.origamitessellations.com/diagrams/star-by-shuzo-fujimoto/

new translation plugin

Published by ericgjerde

I just installed automatic machine translation for my blog- you can now autotranslate into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.

what a handy little plugin- just click the flag in the upper right hand corner! and you can bookmark the translated pages, no less. very cool.

I notice a lot of visitors running my site through Google and Babelfish translations, so hopefully this will save those folks some time.

Thanks to CW @ futurefeeder for the great plugin tip.

ORIPA update

Published by ericgjerde

Roberto Soto posted this email to the Origami-L mailing list:

I just found this Java based program named ORIPA. It’s a program to create
crease patterns (or to draw existing crese patterns), but the funny thing is
that it can actually show youde finished model.

I was just wandering if any of you have heard or read about it before??

the link: http://mitani.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/pukiwiki-oripa/

I had to reply to this, of course- ORIPA is a wonderful software tool, and deserves more attention from the western origami world. I was pleased to find that Jun Mitani had localized it to English, and made an English language page with instructions for how to get it working. That’s a lot of extra work for him, especially with a new baby at home, and I’m very grateful he took the time to do that.

Here’s my reply to the O-list.

I wrote a bit about this program on my site a few months ago:

https://www.origamitessellations.com/2005/12/12/figuring-out-things-with-oripa/

Jun Mitani’s program is quite an excellent one, which works out amazingly well for folding a lot of basic (and not so basic) models. There’s been a lot of traffic in the Japanese origami blog community about this particular app, with a lot of interesting pieces being produced with it.

here’s a few of them, via Technorati’s blog search:

http://www.technorati.com/search/ORIPA

also, Hideo Komatsu has been playing around with ORIPA quite a bit- his blog has a number of posts on his usage of it, especially as he tries to use it to diagram his work (it doesn’t often fold the patterns properly, and I believe he submits the bugs he finds to the author).

you can read his blog here:

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/origami

his blog posts on ORIPA:

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/origami/searchdiary?word=oripa&.submit=%B8%A1%BA%F7&type=detail (http://tinyurl.com/9gcwq, or search for yourself in the left hand search window)

you can run this through babelfish’s translation tool (not so good, though) which will lose the photos- make sure to view it in japanese first, as there’s lots of pictures.

http://tinyurl.com/arkbr (babelfish link, link text is much too long.)

However, there was a posting by Komatsu a while ago which I interpreted as saying that development on ORIPA was coming to an end. That may be completely incorrect, though, so don’t take my word on it.

Jun Mitani has localized the application for English as of version 0.16, which is a wonderful thing- you can view his english language page with instructions here:

http://mitani.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/pukiwiki-oripa/index.php?ORIPA%3B%20Origami%20Pattern%20Editor

(or http://tinyurl.com/8ezde here if that link is too long, and wraps on your screen).

since the program is now available in english, it should significantly lower the barrier for more people to play with it. The application is very interesting- you can lay out a crease pattern, and it will tell you whether or not it will fold; furthermore, it will fold it and show you the final folded model. You can flip the model and see both sides, have it spread out the layers a bit to better see the folds, turn it to wireframe mode so you can see through the layers, etc.

There is also an upload board- kind of a wiki BBS page for discussing issues, uploading files, and the like. that page is here:

http://mitani.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/oripa/upboard/upboard.cgi

All you need to make it run on windows is a reasonably recent Java install, and his program file (currently oripa016.jar). By all means download it and give it a try!

-Eric Gjerde
https://www.origamitessellations.com