Spring 2024

 I haven't updated this blog in so long. I guess I'm graduating from college soon which I have a lot of feelings about. Hopefully I can make a nice post soon.

But anyways over January I taught Alec and Ben a lot of Origami, and I also made lots of horses (Komatsu). Here is one of them - it has no glue and the shaping is very minimal so I am very happy with it!

The paper was some 16 inch Hanji.

I also have this WIP unicorn (Kamiya). It's not even close to done, but someday...

For some general other photos since I guess this doubles as my personal blog, here's some pictures of me, Ben, and Alec at Ben's house:

And we also had a repeat of a funny situation from earlier that month.

Life imitates art:

We all stayed in my suite for the whole month of no work, and had a lot of fun. I'll look on it very fondly.

We also went to the BSO and listened to something. I don't remember what it was though because I don't know how classical music works so I think I zoned out a bit while looking at all the cool marble statues.

OrigaMIT Spring 2022

 I don't really feel like breaking these up into multiple posts, and it's not like I compiled it in a timely manner anyways. I also kind of wanted to include some stuff that's a little less formal.

In early January I was working on Pegasus (Kamiya) from Mulberry:

I think the basic result is ok.

I've always wanted to make stands for displaying my origami. With some help from Elijah, I learned enough basic CAD to scrape by and make a simple clip design. He helped me make stand to hold the clip up, and I had a nice stand for Pegasus!

Next up. I ended up taking [most of] MIT's geometric computing (6.850) class, which was a mix of various algorithms for processing geometric data. I found some of it to be very cool and straightforward enough to be applicable (kd-trees, voronoi, etc.) but a good chunk of it just left me bored at how much setup was required to create a useless algorithm:

But the real reason I took it was because I was hoping to get some useful ideas at how to approach geometric simulations and some practice with any good tools I might want to use to make visual simulations, so that I could ultimately try to recreate something like Oripa from scratch. And that is something I am happy to say that I did learn.

Also Erik Demaine gave a guest lecture on many random things, which was both "cool" and "wow TCS is not for me" at the same time.

I've also really wanted to revisit Bahamut since I folded it [mostly] from CP two-ish years ago (wow so long). Kamiya has an unofficial leg variation which he used in a youtube video that I think fixes a lot of the aesthetic issues with Bahamut 1.0. I've always wanted to try it but only recently figured out that you have to do the Ancient Dragon toe-trick to get the alternate legs.

I used a 24 inch sheet of Unryu. I think the base was incredibly clean whooooo.

Shaping the legs was really hard, but somehow I got it done. I think I did a good job with the whole thing (feat. messy room and many funny things which do not belong to me)

I think the fingers came out really nicely. I actually sat down with Andy and learned how to fold them correctly from a giant piece of kami since the diagrams are pretty messy on those steps.

I never took very fancy pictures of this one either.

To break up the monotony, here's something not just paper related - walking around MIT with OrigaMIT member and fellow recovering chemist John Zhou.

it took him a long to realize this was not a life-size fire escape

Anyways, we've been trying to get a better book organization system at the OrigaMIT office. We finally got a nice shelf and set it up. Looks good!

Late night folding at the office with Ian.

Another random thing I did this semester was watch movies in theaters with Ani and Omkar. Licorice Pizza was good. I also took a film studies class which I liked a lot more than my other classes this semester.

I blinked.

I didn't fold much after the beginning of the semester, besides some basic administrative duties for OrigaMIT. But I did design this dragon head with eyes. It's simple and I like it but I'm not good enough at designing complex 22.5 things to put it onto anything.

Two more late night walks with CKF and Amani since I forgot to sleep near the end of the semester and had the time to feel very nostalgic thanks to a very relaxed finals schedule.

At the very end of the semester the OrigaMIT officers all got together to eat sushi together. Because we're very questionable we bought some of the most touristy things on the menu.

I think taking pictures of people taking pictures of things is very funny.

Finally Finished One Vertex Folding in JS

I wrote a post two months ago about how I had begun converting my Wolfram Demonstration into JavaScript. Its done, and now with a much better UI:

Feel free to try it yourself online. The link is here. The repository with all the code is here.

I learned a lot of JS and canvas stuff on the fly for this one. I just wanted to convert all the infrastructure to JS so I could try some more complex origami problems (like folding a given crease pattern and outputting the visualization). Now that the general ideas are ported and work, I can hopefully try those sometime soon.

Not much else to say so thats all for now.

Converting One Vertex Folding into JS

I was revisiting my earlier One-Vertex Origami Folding project. The project was originally written in Mathematica and presented on the Wolfram Demonstrations project. Previously I began porting some of its functionality into 3D, which I documented on this blog!.

I've recently been working on updating this project - converting it into Javascript so that it can one day run easily online without requiring someone to download Mathematica or the Wolfram CDF player. Hopefully I'll finish implementing 3D functionality at some point soon (probably with WebGL) and it will be able to do 3D simulation online!

This time around I'm also trying to make the implementation more extensible so that the core infrastructure can be used in a much larger project like recreating Oripa.

The github repo of this project is public in case anybody wants to poke around or take a look: https://github.com/anugrahchemparathy/OrigamiToyProjects.

In the meantime here's a video of the basic functionality for computing the flat folding edge. I know the UI is very simple, but those are cosmetic improvements that can be finished later.

I'll try to update this blog with developments under the "Programming" label.

Twins

I made a pair of ancient dragons last year out of 24 inch Pearl VOG. I forgot to post pictures of them so here they are - 1 year late.

Brief opinion break:

There's a long forum chain from way way back (when the forum was a thing people used lol) about how VOG paper isn't very good - and an example given is the ancient dragon.

VOG kind of a weak paper. But it has a very nice weight and thickness for shaping. When making my second VOG AD, a few places became visibly stressed and I had to work carefully. I ended with two nasty tears (one along the diagonal in the tail, and one in the top of the body's center where all the points come together). Both were relatively unobtrusive though, and there's an argument to be made that given how good the product is, it might just be worth it to accept a slight detriment in paper quality to have paper of such a perfect weight and color.

Here are some progress pictures of the first one. I don't have much to say about them. I was going for a new slightly standing pose from my previous ancient dragons.

I forgot to pleat the tail by the time I had added glue to all the legs at which point pleating the tail nicely is not really tenable, so this one has no pleats in the tail.

I also realized that some of my other ancient dragons had fallen into disrepair from sitting out for so long, so I tried fixing them (mostly just the red mulberry one which was several years old at this point).

These are the last pictures I took of it before giving it to a friend.

And of course a family photo...

I liked how 3D I had managed to make the neck/everything in general.  I also like the horns on this one. Probably my best ancient dragon yet. But the tail was still a little awkward since I forgot to put the pleats (or more likely I was on a power trip about minimalist shaping,  then changed my mind), tried putting them in last minute, decided they looked bad, and undid them.

The second one I folded upon arriving to MIT last February. Here's some progress pictures:

A back view of the finished dragon.

I never actually took any good pictures of it. It's more or less an exact copy of the previous one, with fixed tail pleats and a better implementation of the intended pose (this time I full sent the more upright pose - last time I wasn't sure if I wanted to do that so I didn't really commit to it making it look less natural).

I made a new Bahamut last week that could be a very good paired decoration so maybe I'll take a picture of the two together sometime.

Cleaning House

I've recently become significantly more involved in OrigaMIT (the MIT origami club) and decided to revisit some designs I had always wanted to fold but had no idea how to approach before. Every time I spend a couple months away from origami, I somehow have a magic breakthrough in some old projects. Most recently this has manifested in some old Satoshi Kamiya designs.

First up was Tenma H7. I found this very well made precreasing guide online:

I have no idea why I was so intimidated by this design before. The pattern is really straightforward in retrospect. Also a side thing I realized while folding it: the pattern is just the structure of the WOSK diagrammed pegasus with a graft.

See the similarity?

Before I realized this however, I collapsed the base from a piece of 10" foil

The precreasing

The Base (with some small mistakes)

But I had no idea how to thin the front legs enough to look correct. However, upon noticing that it was similar to the WOSK Pegasus (which I had never folded before) I realized I could just use a similar shaping sequence. I folded the WOSK Pegasus first to get an idea of the sequence first, and as a gift (but didn't take pictures).

Then I started folding from a 60 cm square of Terry Tissue Foil:

The base wasn't too difficult

Shaping was a mess

One of my favorite Tenma's is Kota Imai's fold. The fold is not that clean, but the head shaping is really good. Another good Tenma is Shuki Kato's fold - the head is more basic, but everything else is basically perfect.

questionable shaping techniques

Here are roughly finished pictures

My goal with this was just to collapse it and shape it relatively simply, so this final product is acceptable to me. I might refold it at some point. I didn't really know how to do the tufts at the front legs like Kamiya, but some random research leads me to believe they're somewhat similar to the structure of the fingers of the wizard from WOSK, so I might have to fold the wizard then return to this again.

Next up!

 About a year ago I folded the diagrammed Bahamut from Works of Satoshi Kamiya Vol 1 and drew up the crease pattern: http://paperviewsinks.blogspot.com/2021/02/bahamut.html

I personally think the original Bahamut kinda sucks - It's too thick and unwieldy in the legs, and too thin in the chest, the legs are too short, and so on. Most of the folds of Bahamut 2.1 look significantly better so I've always wanted to fold Bahamut 2.1, a significant upgrade to the original Bahamut. 

I used to have no idea how to even set up the references. I'm pretty sure they're actually super easy though. The wing graft is a little larger than in the original Bahamut, and now takes up the middle 2/8 of the diagonal:

I've saved the two Oripa files for future reference in google drive here.

I prepared a sheet of wine unryu with Andy (from OrigaMIT). This was my first time treating paper not at home, and I'm not used to using a foam brush which is super abrasive to the unryu (and kept pulling out fibers thinning out the paper), the MC we had was too thin, and the surface wasn't good so the paper  came out very soft. Very subpar. A comedy of errors.

We cut the square using a letter opener and just folding a diagonal producing an approximately 25 inch square. This left the paper with raw edges which was pretty interesting. The paper was was pretty off-square though because of the mess of treating it leading to warping etc but somehow it all worked out.

Working in the OrigaMIT clubroom

The finished product was okay. Because the paper was so low quality shaping the finer parts was kind of a mess and I just rushed through it to get it over with.  I wasn't really sure how to do the wings so I just improvised using the diagrammed procedure. The resulting wings are huge which is nice - If I folded the whole thing more cleanly, then I would probably really like it. This is definitely not my finest work but whatever - I'm glad its done.

see just how massive the wings actually are

I might revisit this in a couple months or so and fold it from a much better prepared piece of paper, and possibly also much bigger (maybe 36 inches?)