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!

Some Crease Pattern Discussion

I was exploring some design ideas this weekend. Here's some of what I came up with

First off is a deer. I generally try to stick with small grids and simple references. The tree for a basic deer is actually pretty simple provided you are okay with spending a lot of time shaping.

I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the tree and just created some flaps and messed around for a little. After a couple minutes this is what I got. The neck still seems too short though... Let's try increasing the grid

Left:
Aha, now this could be interesting. There are still some problems though. Now there are extra units on the right leg, and there's not much going on at the head, which is a bit disappointing for the larger grid.
Right:
Shifting some units around results in this. It's promising, but the extra space near the top suggests some possibilities.

Maybe by adding units at the top (folding with a rectangle instead, we could get antlers and a more detailed head)

This is an interesting result, I used some more complex structures to widen the torso portions, but it's still not incredible. Also apparently I messed up counting the units and made the torso too long. oops. But the neck is longer, the front legs are shorter (which is important as they won't be crimped in the same way), and we now have ears and antlers!. What we have is still a success. And also something to be tussled with at a later date. Right now, the grid is 20x40, but if I correct the length of the torso it might down to 20x 38, which is not that different from 20x 40, it just involves folding over some units at the end.

Well I had planned on posting more of my discoveries from this weekend tonight, but I still have homework to finish, so I'll write those up at a later date.

Cheers.

Update: 12/11/18
I shifted the body down one unit to make the torso more reasonable, and added some stuff to widen the head:

The weird intersections in the mouth area aren't actually correct, but they're meant to show generally what's going on. Here's a little fold to show what they actually fold like: