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.

Ancient Dragon Alduin version

Merry Christmas! 

My last post was about folding an earlier version of the Ancient Dragon.

http://paperviewsinks.blogspot.com/2020/12/ancient-dragon-10.html

I only just realized how much more enjoyable it was to fold the ancient dragon from the pattern. I had previously despised the design because I hated how much of the precreasing had to be done on the fly. I've always wanted to make an ancient dragon from a 3 foot square, and decided that now was a good time to attempt it.

I used a 3 foot square of tracing paper (not ideal paper choice, but easier to prepare than a 3 foot square of special mulberry paper).

The precreasing process was very challenging and took about two days (not consecutive since I actually started this a while ago). Tracing paper picks up stress marks really easily, and the large size of the paper made it hard to flip over the paper without leading to annoying crinkles.

The early base came along very easily thanks to the large size.

The late base took about another hour. I've included items for scale.

Now came time for shaping. I've always really liked this interpretation of the Ancient Dragon (the so-called "Alduin" version) inspired by Kamiya's own 2017 refold of the classic design. I've always wanted to make one of my own, so I decided to attempt something like it this time.

The basic structure of the legs of the modified shaping is pretty easy to replicate, then once I had chosen the places I wanted to leave the leg shaping folds I began gluing. I brushed glue between each layer, and then with the help of some clips, allowed the paper to dry into its final shape.

I repeated this process on the forelegs, and used a piece of string to hold them in roughly the right position so they wouldn't splay overnight

I've omitted describing the process of shaping the tail since it was pretty boring. I just folded lots of pleats through the tail flap.

The next morning (this morning) was Christmas! I got up and immediately started working on it again.

I still needed to do the head, neck, and put glue in the top piece wings so the layers didn't separate along the top edge.

The first thing I did was put pleats in the neck. I didn't put any glue in the neck (or the tail) because I think that the tracing paper would have wrinkled too much if I had tried that. Glue tends to work poorly on tracing paper when there are places that are only one or two layers thick.

Then I began shaping the head. To do this, I put glue in between each layer of the horns, and did the eye shaping as I normally do. Typically, I skip all the horn and head thinning steps since they take a long time for a mild improvement, but this time I was dedicated to the task at hand, so I actually did the horn thinning last night before I began shaping. I still skipped the head thinning steps though and just used my own eye shaping from the previous Ancient Dragon and God Dragon Bahamut.

The last thing to do was the wings. I chose not to attempt to replicate the wings from the folds (by Ji Woo Han and Kamiya respectively) I showed earlier in the post since I was pretty sure they would not work very well from tracing paper without lots of glue which would lead to unsightly wrinkling. So I just did some basic ancient dragon wings. To prevent the layers from separating, I placed some glue on the thin strip near the top of the wings, as well as a little where the claw point begins.

At this point I was basically done. There's more that I could do, but I have many things I'm interested in making, so I didn't bother doing any more detail work.

The legs are quite detailed. I really liked how they were done in Ji Woo Han's original fold, so I replicated them in my own. Pardon any close up messiness - tracing paper handles varying layers very poorly.

And of course, here's a picture of the whole Ancient Dragon family. I also have a testfold from 19 inch test paper which is now almost 5(?) years old, but it was just made to test the diagram sequence before I made the red version from 24 inch mulberry in my sophomore year of high school a while later, so I usually leave it out of pictures.

The blue one is from 18 inch Mulberry, the red one is from 24 inch mulberry, and the new one is of course 36 inch tracing paper. I'd love to refold it out of mulberry, but have no idea how to prepare a 3 foot square that would work nicely for something with diagonal symmetry (usually I just stitch four 18 inch sheets together, but I'd rather not do that for something like the ancient dragon). I'm also almost out of red mulberry (which World Market no longer sells!), so I'd either have to do it out of another color (which would consume a large amount of my limited world market mulberry supply, or require me to make a trip to PaperTree to buy 6 dollars worth of unryu for just this one project). Paper is expensive and hard to find!

Bahamut BL

In 1997, Kamiya designed God dragon Bahamut, known more commonly as Bahamut BL on origami forum for some reason (presumably because it is meant to resemble the iteration of Bahamut depicted in the cover art for the game Bahamut Lagoon). The design is a mashup of the original Bahamut and the Ancient Dragon (or rather the other way around since it predates the Ancient Dragon, and possibly also the original Bahamut). It has the Ancient Dragon head, but the general structure of Bahamut.

 I've folded this design once before.

At the time I remember being seriously confused by several parts of the crease pattern.

This part in particular probably sticks out to anyone who has tried collapsing this design. I showed it to Eric, an origami friend from high school, who replied:

I think this is a quite apt description.

The reason I chose to revisit this design is because I actually bothered to read the paragraph about the design on Kamiya's website this time. Translated with Google, it reads:

"You can see that there is a structure similar to the ancient dragon from the head to the legs. The area around the base of the wing is supposed to be good, but it should fold up properly. The tail part is also characteristic and I personally like it. 1: 1: 1: 3: 2"

Basically the design is on an 8x8 grid, which is very nice. None of this is particularly eye opening if you read the description, but I had completely forgotten this from the last time I folded it. Presumably I read this last time, but I guess I had forgotten. Knowing the references were so simple made me more interested in trying to collapse it again.

First off, I redrew the important parts of the pattern in Oripa. Here's the pattern with grid sizes of 2,4,8 in case you find them helpful. You can click on the image to make it larger.

I remember the tail portion was extremely confusing last time, and I've become a little obsessed with finding elegant collapsing sequences for stuff recently, so I decided it was worth a try to see if I had improved.

When choosing paper, I knew that I would want to use something larger than a 12 inch square. (the leg pleats get pretty small). I only had a couple pieces of double tissue lying around and they seemed too thick to use. I also had three sheets of sized mulberry - one was cream, one was yellow, and one was hot pink. Naturally, I chose the hot pink.

Here are some progress pictures of the collapse:

The aforementioned weird chest region was collapsed through clean mushing.

The shaping process took many days. I decided to leave the shaping mostly bland - most of my interest in this design was proving to myself that I could collapse all of it (with the exception of the weird wing head connection) cleanly, so trying to be very expressive would have obscured the purpose (and I might have done it poorly since I'm no shaping legend).

Here's an image of the underside, since I think it came out pretty nicely.

And of course I have to include a picture with its big brother - the original ancient dragon[1].

I think it's pretty funny that the past couple posts have been me struggling over basic 22.5 cps, meanwhile something like this seems extremely straightforward to me. Just a random thought. Thanks for reading!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD_ag67tH3I

Learning 22.5 Part 2

 The next design I attempted was Saku Saku's Kelbi (the equivalent(?) of a deer from the game Monster Hunter).

I spent a while trying to figure out the references by hand, and eventually gave up. I asked on the Origami Dan discord, and was told the reference was 1+1+1+ √2. I had no idea what this meant. Turns out cot(22.5º) = 1 + √2. Years of math competitions and I'm still a beginner at geometry evidently.

I still didn't know what to do with this information (short of using some awkward reference from reference finder), until I was told that there was a very useful reference finder on Satoshi Kamiya's website perfect for references of the form a+ b√2: https://www.folders.jp/reference/reference.html

I inputted 3+√2 and got this:

From here it was pretty straightforward. This is all I drew up in ORIPA:

Here are some progress pictures:

Getting the base to resemble the final Kelbi was not too hard from here. It's a really nice design.

A couple days later I taught it to a chemistry friend over a zoom call, so I have another now. I skipped some folds in the head which led to longer antlers(?):

I also attempted Kaede Nakamura's Tiger. The CP is here. Since tan(22.5º) = √2 - 1, the reference ends up being 1 +√2:

You can use the aforementioned reference finder to get a reference for this: https://www.folders.jp/reference/reference.html

The collapse was pretty straightforward now that I actually understood what was going on with the references.

I'm not nearly good enough at shaping to turn this into the finished tiger, but it is nice to know that I can at least figure out the references now.

Learning 22.5 Part 1

I recently decided to put more effort into learning how to fold 22.5 designs. I think this post needs a pretty lengthy preface about why I made this decision, and why I think it's so important, but I'm too tired to write it right now. Maybe later.

In general though, I think 22.5 is more elegant than box pleating for most subjects, and at some point I feel like 22.5 will become far less popular than it deserves.

In the past, much of my trouble with 22.5 cps was finding reference points. Once I have the precreasing done, I can typically figure out the rest.

The first design I attempted was Obelisk's Nazgul. The CP can be found here.

I first redrew some of the important parts of the CP in ORIPA. I've included some of what I figured out below in case it helps anyone (seems like the kind of thing I would have appreciated years ago).

Then I collapsed the base, which wasn't too much trouble (but a little tricky in a few places. There are a lot of extra folds in the original CP which come about from moving flaps into place which I have always had trouble interpreting.

The next design I attempted was Kaede Nakamura's Spinosaurus. Here's a link to his website. I remember looking at this pattern a long time ago (around 2016-17?) and having no idea how to even start precreasing it. Somehow this time, the references just clicked for me and I figured them out within a minute or so. I drew the reference out the reference I used in Inkscape (I was interested in learning how to diagram, but unfortunately Inkscape is extremely slow on mac so I guess I won't be diagramming):

This is the portion of the pattern that I drew out in ORIPA:

I folded the base using 9 inch Kami:

I didn't find a great folding sequence for all of it, but I do remember finding something elegant for the folding the front half. At any rate  I was able to collapse it relatively cleanly. I didn't bother shaping it, because getting from this base to the finished design looks extremely wonky (also 9 inch Kami).

The last CP I attempted was Kaede Nakamura's Carnotaurus. Once again here's a link to his website. The reference was the same as the Spinosaurus, and I didn't bother drawing it out in ORIPA. I've always wanted to make this design (I really like the authors fold) but had no idea how to find the reference.

The base was relatively straightforward, but the actual shaping was extremely confusing. Kaede Nakamura (and probably most 22.5 designers) are clearly extremely talented.

I'm no good at point splits so I did them on the left side arms (the side facing the camera, although you can't see them because of the angle), but I didn't even bother on the right side arms.

Great Egret 2020

The November challenge for the origami-dan discord was "aerial/sky high" so although I haven't designed much in a while, I decided I had to make something before the month ended. I'm in college now at MIT (yay!) so between struggling over math homework and procrastinating with dark souls, I haven't had much time to fold anything.

I've always liked egrets (probably from back when I was a big fan of the great blue heron) and are probably what most people think of when they hear "crane," so I decided to make one.

The underlying structure is not too complex

A 48x48 grid. The head on the left side was a possible adaptation of my great blue heron head, which I ultimately didn't use since I didn't want to mess with any extra thickness. So the actual pattern I folded was that on the right.

I've always wanted to make one of these birds on a large scale, and I didn't feel like preparing lots of mulberry or double tissue, so I just used a 3x3 foot square of tracing paper.

Precreasing was a challenge since I haven't worked on this scale very much, and I use a much smaller table now and have much less space (the 3x3 foot square doesn't even fully fit on it).

Thankfully the collapse was very straightforward

Once I got to the base, I started folding the feathers.

Note that this design is basically inseparable from the use of glue at this size. This is because to make the feather pleats separate properly, I fold the them awkwardly over the actual wing flap. In the past, I have gotten away with not using glue in the wings (for example the double tissue parrot from last November did not need glue in the wings) when the paper is agreeable, but  3 foot square tracing paper is not so good for this.

I made one small mistake in the spacing of the legs relative to the body, so I ended up using glue to push the legs one unit forward (which also lost one unit of length on the legs). Fixing the rivers(? not sure if this is the correct terminology) is relatively straightforward though, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader. If you're interested in folding this design, as long as you're ok with using some glue to reposition the two leg flaps, this mistake won't bother you, and you can ignore this whole paragraph of commentary!

At any rate, I'm quite fond of the shaping on the legs. I think they came out quite well anyways.

One particular lesson I learned while making this is that you should always  make sure the legs are a little further forward in the base than what you choose when drawing the tree, or else the tail plume risks looking too short. Also, always make the tail plume longer than anatomically true since for some reason this little bit of trickery makes things (oddly) appear more realistic (at least in my opinion).

Thanks for reading!