Category: Origami

E is for Elephant

Since I got back from my trip I’ve been meaning to get another build out on my Foldinator software. It’s very close, I swear. But fate has conspired. My work situation is, um, interesting again. The VP of my new group is leaving the company at the end of the year to start up a startup, which puts my team somewhat out in the woods again. Meanwhile we are aligning like battleships amid icebergs with two other platform projects and one brand business unit to bring a whole slew of web sites online on our technology stack in the new year. Crunch time is coming as we all figure out the missing pieces we need to go live. I’ve been spending most of my work days doing planning lately, and trying to jam in some coding in the spaces between meetings. So it’s been hard to sink my mind into another codebase.

The other thing is I’ve been working on a new origami sculpture which I want to have done by Thanksgiving. I came up with the idea right after I got home from PCOC and have folded a few tests out of foil, to the point where I have it refined enough to give it a go from nice paper. These advanced models take a while to work out.

To take your mind off your troubles, here’s a link to an article about the OUSA Holiday Tree in the American Museum of Natural History, featuring an alphabet of very nice models, including one by yours truly.

Californigami

I just got back from a great trip to San Francisco for the Pacific Coast Origami Conference. It was Jeannie’s idea for me to go, and I must say I was kind of ambivalent about the whole thing until I actually started the journey. But it was great and she deserves a big thanks. The conference went from Friday to Sunday and was a ton of fun. I lived in the Bay Area from the mid-90’s to the early 2000’s, but haven’t been back for a few years, so I also spent an extra day visiting old haunts and catching up with friends.

I must be getting older. Old people are famous for getting up early. It didn’t really bother me to have to get up at 4:30 to get to the airport in time. It felt like getting up for a normal day of work. A few random skipped meals didn’t bother me either, nor did the time zone change or lack of sleep. I cashed out the last of my frequent flier miles from the 90’s when I flew 100,000 miles a year and got an upgrade to business class. It was awesome! The seat was like a living room recliner chair. Since I’m well over 6 feet tall it made a big difference for me being able to nap on the plane.

I was flying alone and wanted everything to fit in my carry on including the models for my exhibit. For my exhibit I made a new batch of models from the designs I know well; sort of a greatest hits collection. These included my Elephant, Moose, Lizard, Turtle, Balloon, UFO, Luv Bug and Loon.

The Pacific Coast Origami Conference (PCOC) is smaller than the New York convention, but a bunch of friends showed up, including some NYC people like Jan and Tony, and the M.I.T. crowd including Brian, Jason, Aviv, Andrea and Tian, who are smart and geeky enough to be fun to hang out with, and others like Eric G, Jared, and Nathan. Brian makes lots of puns and Jason quotes Monty Python enthusiastically and inaccurately and sings contagiously. Andrea has moved to San Mateo and is working for Oracle and Aviv was out there for an interview. Nathan is done college and living in SF working as a school teacher. And so it goes.

I stayed at the hotel where the conference was, which made it pretty convenient. We had some really good Thai food in Japan Town after wandering around in an indecisive group looking for a place Robert Lang recommended, but knew neither the name or location. I bought some really nice origami paper and won a sheet of handmade origamido paper for participating in a folding challenge.

While I was there I folded (among other things) a new original model: an Eve robot to go with Brian’s Wall-E. I taught a class which was a hit. I’m working on a book and brought a whole stack of diagrams, hoping people would fold them and give me feedback. Everyone wanted to fold my Turtle since it was in the model menu, and so I taught that from memory while a few people folded from diagrams on the side.

I’d forgotten what a beautiful city SF is. So mellow and picturesque, especially compared to New York. Saturday morning I took an epic walk. I went from the hotel across town, down the crookedest block of Lombard Street, up to Coit Tower, and then down and around to the waterfront, Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf. I had planned on riding the cable car back to the hotel, but when I got there the line was way too long and there was a bad guitarist playing guitar and singing badly to try and get tips from the people in queue. So I walked back up to the hotel.

Monday I rented a car and drove down 280 to Silicon Valley. I had lunch with my friend Wanda in Palo Alto. It was great to see her and catch up. It was a beautiful day and fun to see my old neighborhood. I went for a hike at a place called Windy Hill, which is just up at the top of the hills from there. The ride up is a crazy switchback road thru redwood forests. From the top you can look down and see Stanford, Moffett Field and the whole bay, and even San Francisco off in the distance. Turn around and you see the Pacific Ocean out over the hills to the west.

Ah, my heart is torn in two. I loved living there and love the land and the climate and the culture and people and everything about the place and would love to go back.

In other news, Lizzy got her cast off the day I left. She was born in California and fantasizes about going to college at Stanford as her destiny. I tell her get good grades. She’s with me in pining to move back. I suppose if the right opportunity comes up. But then there’s reality of there here and now.

The last thing the happened at work before I left was that I packed up my office. My whole project moved to a new floor. I flew the red eye overnight Monday and worked at home yesterday, so today I got in to see my new space. It’s much nicer than my old one. It’s a corner office with windows on three walls and a view of Hell’s Kitchen and Times Square. The movers didn’t take my chair (which was a nice one that I brought with me from Nick when I joined the platform group), and my colleagues told me the chairs all were gone and lost. But I went up there and another guy had appropriated it, and gave it back without me having to get too insistent. Another thing, my company just announced extra days off for everyone for the holidays, so it looks like I can take a good long xmas vacation this year.

Coming soon: pictures!

Origami Polyhedra Design

My friend John Montroll has a new book out, called Origami Polyhedra Design. It’s been in the works for quite a while and is a real tour de force. Congratulations John! This is his third book on origami polyhedra, and his first for the publisher A. K. Peters. (They publish a bunch of origami books including Robert’s ODS, and the Proceedings from the 3OSME Conference, which contains a paper by yours truly.) Unlike most origami polyhedra, which are modular, John’s are always from a single square sheet. This a challenging and rigorous style to fold in.

In a change from John’s usual style, this book is much thicker, almost 300 pages, and divided into three major sections. The first is a wealth of theory including general principles, design techniques and consideration, and methods for dividing into nths, for finding angles, folding various polygons, and other related topics. This is really good stuff. The second section of the book is devoted to a variety of models related to the Platonic Solids, including color-change and sunken variations. Totally awesome. The third section is Dipyramid models. This a particular specialty of John’s and there is a great variety of dipyramids with different proportions and number of facets, and a chapter of really cool dimpled (semi-sunken) dipyramids.

All in all the book is really quite amazing, and really takes origami polyhedra design to the next level. And while it is a real Magnum Opus, John has enough unpublished polyhedra to form the basis of anther book, so I hope this one does well and a sequel materializes.

John asked me to fold a few of the models pictured on the cover. I must say it’s very nice looking cover, with the model well arranged and photographed. John’s site is not yet updated to list the new book, and if you go to order it on Amazon there is no cover image yet. So I was taking some pictures of my models for the upcoming PCOC origami convention in San Francisco, and thought I’d share a shot of John’s book while I’m at it. (I know the lizard there doesn’t strictly fit with the theme, but it reminded me of an Escher print and I thought it looked cool.)

Origami Site Update

I’ve made a number of updates to my Origami Site. I’ve added new photos for my Moose, Elephant, Baluchitherium and Bears. I’ve also added a few new models including my War Elephant, Castle, and accompanying explorations, and added a new section for Origami Architecture. This is a substantial step forward for my origami site. I have a few models still for which I want to fold and photograph an exhibit-quality model, and beyond that breaking the list of models down to be browsable by category and year.

Enjoy!

Megafauna Origami

As mentioned previously I made some megafauna origami models to donate to the American Museum of Natural History for their annual origami holiday tree. I did three models this year: a moose, an elephant and a bear. All three are made out of large paper and therefore quite big. The moose is made from a 32” square of brown parcel wrap, which was the biggest usable piece I could find. I tried making an elephant out of the same stuff, but I had the idea of wrinkling and then flattening the paper first to give it an elephant hide texture. The paper ended up with a slightly strethcy, almost clothlike consistency. The model is just one layer thick over the whole back, so it came out way to floppy. A very interesting failure. I’ll have to keep the technique in mind for the future. I made another elephant out of a 24” square of Canson, which is a thick art paper and very good for making elephants. Lastly I made the bear out of 15” Tant. I’m quite pleased with how all three came out and I hope the museum will use them well.

As an bonus I am including a pic of a funny little are project Lizzy and Michelle undertook not to long ago. They started making origami boats out of Masu boxes, and then put them together on top of corks.

Fall Groove

Well it’s more of the same over here. Nonstop busy. Work work work, making Jack a dull boy. My job situation with the clueless manager seems to have sorted itself out at least. The fall has come. Leaf raking season is upon us, although I expect I’ll still have to mow the lawn one more time. It’s getting darker and colder. We have to turn the heat on every night these days. Starting to get up before the sky is fully light. Ugh. And it’s no longer light or warm enough to go skating in the evening when I get home from work. So I’ve switched to using the Nordic Track indoors, which is not as much fun but I can listen to music while I’m doing it, so it gives me a chance to listen to the mixes from my record. Continuing to chip away at that, thank you very much.

I did some cool origami stuff. I made some “megafauna” models to donate to the American Museum of Natural History for their holiday tree. More on that soon. I’ll take some pictures tomorrow in the daylight. I’ve also started diagramming my Medieval Dragon. It starts with dividing the paper into ninths, which is something I always used to eyeball, but for the diagrams I worked out how to do it the legit mathematical way, which is pretty cool.

Jeannie and celebrated out Crytsal anniversary last week (I looked it up). It was a school night and so we did laundry and helped the kids study. Ah, married life after 15 years. We did meet for lunch in the city and go to a nice Thai place called Yum Yum. Afterwards we went to Toys’R’Us in Times Square and I bought her a lego dwarven catapult.

Denis and Sarah came to visit last weekend. We all had lots of fun. Carrie and Michelle always get on great and little Anna is walking already. Saturday Mary’s all came over and Jeannie’s parents too. Jeannie made a fantastic dinner for sixteen people. Chicken parmesan, eggplant parmesan and pasta. I was surprised to discover we had enough tables and chairs for everyone to eat once.

Fall Down, Part II

Seems that this is the time of year for work in progress. Here’s an update on a bunch of project. You can skip it if you find it boring.

My job has entered a new planning cycle. I’m trying to figure out how to deal with a manager who’s making it difficult for me to accomplish what I need to do. I want to moving forward with a major new feature set of my product, and he’s not getting it together to provide me with usable requirements. I working on him to see that it’s in his best interest to let me take over some things, but he is reluctant to give up control even though he’s spread too thin.

In music, I’ve been finishing off my album Face The Heat. I updated the page, including links to the newest mixes. I’m in the final phase, really focused on the details of the mixes now. Probably one or two pass at each song remains, but I find after I do a mix I have to take a few days and listen to it.

But in the sense that I want to finish my record to make time for origami, so far it’s kinda backfired. I have a trip coming up to California next month for the Pacific Coast Origami Conference, and I’d like to have something new for that. I took the summer off from working on my book, but now I have to get back into it. Last winter I was in a groove of diagramming over a model a month, but that’s a pretty heavy pace. So far this fall I made some corrections to my Lizard and began diagramming my Medieval Dragon, which will be probably over 70 steps! I also have a bunch of models in development, including some insects: a new butterfly, a dragonfly, and maybe another crack at the ladybug. And then there’s the batch from June that need further refining: the Blimp, the Sphere and the Orb UFO. So I’ve been doing some origami, just not as much as I’d like. Ah well I still have a month.

I’ve also made progress on the Foldinator, my origami software. It is now generating the paper procedurally using the drawing API. Also I‘ve defined the various lines weights and colors the application needs. I have a bit further to go before I release the next demo, however. I want to draw the initial state of the paper based on what it says in the xml file for the model. This requires a bit of plumbing so that the paper is aware when the model is loaded. After that I will probably go on to the non-folding operations, namely flipping and rotating the paper.

I’ve realized that I am long overdue in updating my origami site with pictures of my 2009 models. The web site redesign is probably far enough along that I should shift gears and take care of this before carrying on with that. The photography and photoshop is a whole little project in itself. While I’m at it, I should update my general photo gallery with pictures from the summer before it gets too far behind.

Foldinator 2 Build 2

Development of Foldinator2 continues. You can see the second prototype here:

http://zingman.com/foldinator2/foldinator2.html

Meanwhile the first prototype is archived here:

http://zingman.com/foldinator2/old_versions/foldinator2_build01/foldinator2.html

It still doesn’t fold paper, but it’s starting to do some interesting things. You can click on the “Load” button and see a list of models, encoded as OrigamiXML files. Select one and open it. You can see the UI update display the model name and author, and the text annotation for the first step. You can use the shuttle controls in the lower right to move forward and backward thru the steps, and jump to the beginning or end of the model.

A bunch of stuff is going on behind the scenes in support of this. I’ve implemented a file loader for the xml file that contains the list of models and their file names, as well as for the models themselves. I’ve create a hierarchy of classes to represent the data. The first of these is OrigamiModel, which contains metadata about the model, such as the title and author, and holds references to two other objects, OrigamiPaper and an ArrayCollection of steps. OrigamiPaper has properties for the papers proportions, color and starting orientation. The steps are of type OrigamiStep. This class contains properties for the steps action, annotation, and an ArrayCollection of creases. OrigamiCrease encapsulates the data to represent a crease, including properties such as the end coordinates, angle, parity swing, layers, etc. These last two classes will likely develop more properties and functionality as I build the folding engine.

I need to do a bit of bulletproofing around the initialization, and then it’s on to the main event, namely drawing and animating the folding paper. To begin with I’ll just be drawing a square procedurally and in accordance with the initial state specified in origamiPaper. Then I’ll be analyzing the geometry of the crease in the first step and breaking the square into appropriate polygons with a common edge, and rendering that. At first I’m going to concentrate on non-folding operations, namely Flip and Rotate the paper. Then it’s on to simple folds: Valley Fold, Mountain Fold, and Fold/Unfold. It’ll be a fair amount of work to get this far. Hopefully I’ll be able to apply this recursively for the second and subsequent steps, but more than likely there’ll be some gotcha.

Deep Summer

Well it’s the second half of the summer now, and we’re getting our first real heat wave. It’s been in the 90’s since last week, with no rain for a change, and no end in sight. We’re getting peppers and tomatoes from our garden daily now. And even though we’ve been busy, we’ve had some time to enjoy summer activities. We took the kids to Playland last Friday evening and the kids enjoyed the rides and we saw fireworks. Michelle is exactly 4 feet tall, which was the cutoff for a lot of rides, and it some of the ride operators were being extra picky. They wouldn’t let her on the big rollercoaster (too short), and then later they almost wouldn’t let her on some the kiddie rides (too tall)! They wouldn’t let me on the bumper cars for being too tall. The park has a bunch of old, classic rides from the 1920’s. The carousel had a genuine calliope, sort of a player piano crossed with a pipe organ and robot percussion section, that was fascinating to watch and listen to.

We went to beach on Sunday, which was great, except for on the ride home the car started making trouble, one of the brakes was overheating and seizing up. It’s in the shop now, but the car has just about 100,000 miles on it, so we’re starting to think about how long we want to keep it and keep repairing it. There are a lot of things I like about the Jeep, and over all it’s in pretty good shape, so it’s tempting to just keep it running. On the other hand, that’s the strategy we’re following with Jeannie’s car, so we don’t want to be in the situation where we need to replace both cars at the same time. And of course to replace it would be a whole research project to figure out what kind of vehicle to replace it with, and it’s gonna take a whole lot of precious time to do it right. Since I’m so tall, most of the cars our there are not good for me to drive, and even a lot of larger SUV’s are not well designed for tall people. Right now is not a good time for it’s since we have a camping trip coming up this weekend, and another road trip a couple weeks after that. Still, I think we better start looking into it so we’re prepared.

I’ve been making progress on a bunch of side projects. Luckily we’ve had no major home repairs or other projects of necessity for a little while, and things are at an even keel for the time being with my job, so I’ve been doing fun stuff. I’ve basically taken the summer off from working on origami and my book, since I was jamming on it really hard back in May and June. But it’s getting close to the top of the list as other things get done. I dusted off the Foldinator and began development of version 2.0. I worked out a format for Origami XML, and posted a first build. The second build will be along in a few weeks. I stated redoing my web site in PHP to support dynamic pages, and have implemented the first set of scripts. Still on the todo list is take pictures of all my new 2009 origami models, which will happen sometime this fall.

I’ve been making great progress with music. I bought a guitar a few weeks ago, and have been playing it enough that I’m starting to get somewhere. I’m think of writing a guitar based song even, something in the approximate style of Greg Lake. That will be on a future project, as this one is nearing the end. My friend Erik has agreed and to help me mix and master my record, which is great news. And I finished a complete song in record time in July. Now I’m working on the ninth and final song for my record, with the help of my friend John. More on that in a future post.

Foldinator 2 – First Build

Development of Foldinator2 is off to a good start. You can see the first prototype here:

http://zingman.com/foldinator2/foldinator2.html

Admittedly it doesn’t do much yet. So far it’s mostly framework and boilerplate MVC code. Not so glamorous, but important, like pouring the concrete for the foundation of the house. The data model class is defined and has a few important properties, including a reference to an object paper, which is currently just a square drawn to the screen, but will be the heart and soul of the application. The app presents a starting UI, and all the buttons are mapped thru events to commands. There may be more views and interface elements later, but this is enough to get going; anything new will fit into the established structure. Also I put a text output console, to make debugging easier going forward.

I have one more milestone to go before I get into actual folding in simulation. First implement the guts of Load button, read in an XML file and parse it, and assign the info and the steps to the (data) model. Next is to step thru the model using the shuttle controls. At first this will be text–only. The app will display the step number and the annotation for the current step. Once this is done, then it will be time to apply the fold specifications to the paper for each step.

Meanwhile, my brother Martin has begun work on an origami application of his own, and post a demo here:

http://www.victoryhearts.com/origamagiro/

His working title for it is “origamagiro”, a nice palindrome, but then he looked up the meaning of “giro” in Japanese here:

http://jisho.org/words?jap=giro&eng=&dict=edict

Well “giro” could mean battle, argument, controversy, guillotine…. or brothel. Martin sez: “Interesting contextual possibilities! Maybe we need to find a person actually fluent in Japanese to ask!”

Martin’s approach is in many ways complimentary to mine. He’s developing in Silverlight, so the possibility of us sharing code is slim to none, but that’s ok cuz we can share ideas at a conceptual level, which may ultimately be far more fruitful. Second, while I’m working my way in and building the groundwork, he’s diving right in and confronting the hard conceptual problems of graphics, modeling an animation head on. So while my first demo has a bunch of nice looking buttons, his has a virtual piece of paper that the user can manipulate.

Watch this space for future developments.