This is one of Gila O’s folds, which is a very nice example of one of Alex Bateman’s crease patterns. I just keep mentioning that guy today, probably because we had a few email exchanges- his work is kind of stuck in my head!
Gila’s nifty stuff is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/87477835@N00/, she has some newly created folds there as well. check out some of her new work and let her know how cool it is!
First off, let me post a link to Alex’s new site- it’s www.papermosaics.co.uk. Not only does he have some great material there, but he also created a software program that generates tessellations- and it’s released under the GPL! (that means free forever, and allows derivative works that also must remain free). That’s an excellent thing, and really warms my heart. I’m a huge open source junkie and I always like to see people release things for free rather than trying to lock them up forever.
Which leads me to my next point- Alex has an e-book available at his website, which he graciously provided a gratis copy of (thanks Alex!) It’s 3 pounds (which is about $5.40 US currently) and is a very nicely put together document, with a number of good introductory folds and lots of photos. I’m going to give some of them a go once I get a chance to put them on some thin paper.
I’ve been trying to put together some simple PDF documents with diagrams and photos for a few months now, and it’s HARD. I think it’s great that Alex is trying to get a little something for his work here, and I encourage any of you interested in tessellations to check it out. It’s a way to not only get a little more insight into his thinking and designs, but to also support his hard work in releasing software and folding goodies for you folks to play with.
I only hope the docs I end up releasing come out half as good. I’ll be happy!
Alex Bateman wrote a swell perl script/app a while back called “Tess”, located here. it works quite well when you run it on a mac (providing you have the appropriate perl libraries installed from CPAN or elsewhere) but it really doesn’t run all that well on a windows PC, unless you go through a lot of setup. most of those steps are quite honestly a bit beyond most people, and since I have a commercial Perl compiler environment available to me I made a standalone application that runs on any windows PC.
I’ve contacted Alex, in the hopes that I’ll be able to get him to post it on his site. I can’t accurately discover the licensing that he released his program under, so I’m not distributing it to anyone until I get some feedback from him.
Here’s a screenshot of Tess running under windows:
currently it still outputs to postscript, and I have no interest in changing that unless I’m sure the licensing supports me modifying anything. I’d probably integrate some sort of ps2pdf type functionality, as PDF is pretty universal. of course, if you’re using a mac, it just opens up postscript documents in Preview no problem…
I put up a photo gallery on https://www.origamitessellations.com which is located here. It’s about 150 photos of various origami things, most of which I’ve posted to my flickr account and some which I haven’t. I usually end up taking about 20 photos of any given piece, and most of those don’t go onto flickr since there’s such a tight size restriction.
This is really a testing page for the gallery, as I’m not terribly enthused about it at the moment. I’ve been using and abusing HTML since about 1993, but it’s never been something I’ve enjoyed a whole lot. I’m looking for a push-button tool that makes things look pretty without a lot of effort!
Anyway, lots of origami tessellations and hexagons, triangles, squares, and stars to check out there. I’ve got the first page of my draft document done for a piece on origami tessellations! I’m happy to make some progress.
I just registered www.origamitessellations.com today! I figured that was a good first step to motivate myself to commit some of my material to a more permanent form. I’ve got a few quick pages of writeup that I’m looking to post soon, although formatting is still a bit of a problem. I’m just not great at the whole “graphic designer” role, and usually I’m able to pawn off that sort of work to others.
regardless, I’m looking forward to sharing some more in-depth material with you folks out there, and of course I’m hoping to actually get some traffic to the site. I always feel better about sharing materials when I know that people really are looking at it (who doesn’t?)
So, make sure you check it in a few weeks or so- https://www.origamitessellations.com. thanks!
-Eric
