Origami

Support Modeling
1

As a newbie I would like an advice as to
what extra is needed (if) and how to start folding thin meshes (paper texture) with
diagramming and possible animation of folding steps.

Thank you

2

  1. On a plane that is the same shape as the paper you would use in life, make cuts with the knife tool along EVERY fold you would end up making.

  2. Rig the plane so that you can fold it up. (This definitely falls under the category of ‘easier said than done’.)

  3. Animate the armature folding up your paper.

I don’t think that this would be a very good newbie level project.

3

That would be a VERY difficult rig. So many bone weights would have to change throughout the animation to make the mesh deform along the new folds. Unfortunately that is probably the only way to do it so it looks perfect.
As a suggestion for a slightly easier approach, you could start in the same way as LotR Junkie suggested, then use shape keys to create each intermediate stage in the folding. Rotations wouldn’t look quite right, but it wouldn’t be major, and the upside is it would be a lot quicker. Alternatively you could use the same method to work backward from the finished model.

4

Can you post the origami model?
It is hard to model such objects without cheating. Also note that the paper have thickness that reflect on the model shape. Animation is even harder.
But it all depends of the purpose :slight_smile:

5

For a starter, link below shows the diagram that must be produced for a convention or a book for your idea to be published/recognized in the origami community (I think the thickness and rendering is irrelevant) - This one is of a very classic traditional crane model:

My general idea was that somehow the paper square would be defined by Blender in 3D and then successively folded in 3D. It would then be easier to manipulate viewing the successive folding steps from various angles and getting the final view of the model thus keeping the new ideas for models in a neatly blender file or animation.

The folding instructions for a print (as above) can be made in some other 2D program using blender views documenting steps, and adding the origami notation.

The animation could be somehow similar to this :

http://origami.org.uk/origamicrane.htm

Thank you for an answer if this is possible.

6

This thread is already nearly a year old but this thread has the right title :slight_smile:
I am just lately busy to try Origami with Blender (2.49) too.
See the .blend file

With bones, I am too much a newbie … especially Step 5 … in the .blend file …

I would like to let the animations done by the BGE (to generate later the IPO-curves), is this possible?

Attachments

origamiBlendPolis2.blend (52.1 KB)