Bahamut

 About a month ago, I decided to make Satoshi Kamiya's Bahamut design on a whim. I always hated this design. I'd folded it a few times before from diagrams, but I could never quite get the head right - it was always too small to fold cleanly. I also think the legs and arms always come out very short and stupid looking. I've only seen one or two good Bahamut's out there.

At any rate, after folding the Ancient Dragon from CP a couple times recently, I decided I should also learn how to do Bahamut from CP. First up, I redrew the pattern myself. The reference was some kind of 1/2^n along the diagonal I believe.

The next step was to figure out how to fold the head. The details of the head portion of the CP in the book are very small and hard to see, and several folds are missing from it. The first thing I did was isolate a small portion of the CP involving the head so that I could testfold the base and then use the diagrams to complete the remaining shaping steps:

Shown above is the rough section that I testfolded.

What a clean octagonal sink

The famed "bahamut christmas tree"

Two testfolds I completed

I then decided to try the full design. I didn't know what paper to use, but I remembered I had some black Ikea kraft lying around, so at about 2 AM I cut out a large ~70 cm square. And then I got tired and fell asleep.

But the next day I woke up and actually decided to fold it. The entire process was about 1 full day over winter break.

I didn't take many progress pictures of the early base, so these are all progress steps roughly following the diagrammed sequence (and at some point basically just following the diagrams since the structure of Bahamut is so bizarre that I didn't feel like guessing from the pattern).

By the end, it was getting pretty late since I took many breaks in between (I hate making Bahamuts) so I switched to lamp light.

After a long time fiddling with the wings I got to about the end.

By this point I was pretty frustrated with the design. The legs looked like they would still be short and annoying. Nevertheless I pressed on with the gift of lots of white glue.

Thats all for now. I'm moving to college soon, so I'm trying to get all my winter break posts that I forgot to write finished before I leave. I'll miss California a lot.