Pop-out Prosperity

Happy Chinese New Year everyone!

As promised, here's my CNY post!

In the last Origami Singapore meet-up, some of us folded Eric Joisel's Rat model and compared them around. Eileen wanted to do a variation on it, and suggested to me (since I could fold a design that "popped out" from the paper) that I fold a rat in a maze, all popping out of the paper.

The first step in trying to make the model was, of course, learning how to fold a maze first.

In the meeting itself Eileen and I experimented around and tried to figure out a method to fold a series of solid walls that could bend around and connect to form a real maze. We found one, but I realised later that it would not work very well. I tried again at home and finally got a method to do the job; I'll be posting about the method in subsequent posts.

Another idea I had during the meet-up was that instead of using the "walls" to form a maze, why shouldn't I use it to form words? Chinese New Year was coming, and I should be trying something big...

I did a lot of planning and after one prototype, ta-daa...



Pop-out prosperity!

As my method currently can only deal with 90-degree angles, the Simplified Chinese character "福" would have been impossible to fold. Hence, I chose the Traditional Chinese character with a "示" radical.

This model was done on a 32 x 32 grid.

To show the three-dimensionality of the model, here's another picture:



It's a little uneven, but nothing's perfect. (:

From here you can see that I've solved the problem of making a maze.

The CP for this model is a little complicated, so it will take a while for me to create it, if I can summon up the energy to do it.

I'm gonna try out more chinese characters in the future! Guess what I'll be posting on Valentine's Day...

Once again, Happy Chinese New Year, and may this year be full of prosperity!


Origami as Pure as Snow
shonen