TreeMaker: Origami Design Software | Hacker News Reader

TreeMaker: Origami Design Software

langorigami.com

155 pointspoppingtonic12 comments

Robert Lang's tome Origami Design Secrets was my first non school related introduction into mathematics. I remember looking in awe at the equations in the back of the book, then I started taking math courses ... For awhile there I was almost able to follow what he was talking about, now 8 years out of uni, I can once again look in the back of that book in awe.

I also have that book by Lang. But I've yet to tackle it. I hope to do so while my fingers and eyesight are still good enough to fold origami figures.

Although it's not origami, Pepakura Designer is another popular piece of software for creating 3D paper models.

http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/

I think that's what Erik Demaine mentioned in his folding class.

Link: http://erikdemaine.org/folding/ ; http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.849/fall10/lectures/

Really interesting. The Linux port is not maintained, unfortunately (last worked on ubuntu 10.04, apparently - someone made a docker environment here: https://github.com/AndrewKvalheim/treemaker but the base image is so old it is not on docker hub any more.

I love this quote from the book "Origami Design Secrets":

  If you are a beginning designer, you should realize that no design is sacred. To learn to design, you must disregard reverence for another’s model, and be willing to pull it apart, fold it differently, change it and see the effects of your changes.

  Small ideas lead to big ideas; the concepts of design build upon one another.

Without getting into the mathematics, can somebody point me to a decent website that can teach me origami from basics? When I google, I get sent to a bunch of sites that are often not well designed to teach.

Youtube.

I learned first by borrowing books from my local library and then from Robert J. Lang books I bought. But that was before the Internet. Nowadays YouTube is an excellent resource for learning some foundational folding principles, some base folds, and getting past tricky "folding bottlenecks" that were always a huge frustration for me when I was learning from books. It's just really hard to clearly convey some 3D folding steps with only 2D diagrams. For example some of Robert J. Lang's phenomenal insect models (https://www.amazon.ca/Origami-Insects-Robert-J-Lang/dp/04862...) are hundreds of steps, and it's super frustrating to get stuck at say step 130 with only 45 left to go.

Anyway, I prop up an iPad up with Youtube and work through models with my 6 year old son, and he's learning way way faster than I did when I was his age.

You would probably be best served with a nice introductory book. It would teach you the fundamental folds, and also how to follow printed origami instructions. If you get stuck on any particular exercise, there are certainly video tutorials on YouTube that may also help.

Unrelated to the content. When I tried to access the page, it showed me a message that my IP is banned.

http://archive.is/fB1oV if you still want to read it.

Great just what I needed... another hobby! What a completely interesting read

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