Virtual Paper Cut & Fold
This started as an interactive holiday card project for our company that
was supposed to take a couple of weeks to finish. I had an inkling it
might be more complicated than that, but I had no idea it would take me
almost a year to get something that was relatively bug free.
Instructions for our online paper folding activity are below; or you can go
straight to the gallery to see what others
have been up to and start folding paper online yourself!
Or - jump right in and make a flake:
from prefolded paper (easiest);
with folding guidelines;
from scratch (for experts).
Here are the basic rules:
-
You can fold the paper by (clicking fold and) dragging a line segment
across it. Then the cursor will change to an up-down double arrow.
Click on one side or the other of your fold to indicate which side should
fold down.
-
You can cut the paper by (clicking cut and) drawing a series of
connected lines by repeatedly clicking and moving the mouse; the cutting is
finalized with a double-click (or by crossing your own cutting
line).
-
You can discard pieces of paper. Be careful where you click: The
Java applet version has one level of undo.
-
You can unfold - this unfolds the most recent fold.
-
Finally you can save by entering a name in the type-in box and
pressing the "save/print" button. This creates several saved versions of
your snowflake, including a PDF for printability.
It's not origami, is it, but has many similarities. We plan to introduce
some additional folding techniques that will enable us to do more
origami-ish stuff. Take a look at these origami simulations:
- Miyazaki Origami simulator
- JT Nimoy shows some ideas for an origami user interface
In the meantime, try making snowflakes or other interesting shapes (there are zillions of sites with instructions; here are a few):
http://www.myweb3000.com/snowflakes.html
http://www.papersnowflakes.com/preview1.htm
http://www.geocities.com/starsandflakes/
http://ms-t-inc.com/pdf-file/snowflak.pdf
http://mama.essortment.com/papersnowflake_rfiq.htm
http://flagday.com/history/star_in_one_cut/flagstar.shtml
A shockwave snowflake "designer"!:
http://www.explorescience.com/activities/Activity_page.cfm?ActivityID=13
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