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Technical Origami

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Technical origami, also known as origami sekkei, is a field of origami that has developed almost hand-in-hand with the field of mathematical origami. In the early days of origami, development of new designs was largely a mix of trial-and-error, luck and serendipidity. With advances in origami mathematics however, the basic structure of a new origami model can be theoretically plotted out on paper before any actual folding even occurs. This method of origami design was pioneered by Robert Lang, Meguro Toshiyuki and others, and allows for the creation of extremely complex multi-limbed models such as many-legged centipedes, human figures with full complement of fingers and toes, and the like.

The main starting point for such technical designs is the crease pattern, often abbreviated as CP, which is essentially the layout of the creases required to form the final model. Although not intended as a substitute for diagrams, folding from crease patterns is starting to gain in popularity, partly because of the challenge of being able to break the pattern, and also partly because the crease pattern is often the only resource available to fold a given model, should the designer choose not to produce diagrams.

Ironically enough, when origami designers come up with a crease pattern for a new design, the majority of the smaller creases are relatively unimportant and added only towards the completion of the crease pattern. What is more important is the allocation of regions of the paper and how these are mapped to the structure of the object being designed. For a specific class of origami bases known as uniaxial base', the pattern of allocations is referred to as the circle packin. Using optimization algorithms, a circle-packing figure can be computed for any uniaxial base of arbitrary complexity. Once this figure is computed, the creases that are then used to obtain the base structure can be added. This is not a unique mathematical process, hence it is possible for two designs to have the same circle packing, and yet different crease pattern structures.

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