SASAKI Kosuke / 佐々木好祐

Folding a thin sheet material such as paper along curves creates a developable surface composed of ruled surface patches. Although several methods for constructing such shapes on a computer have been proposed, it is still difficult to check the folded shapes instantly from the crease patterns. We propose a simple method that approximately realizes a simulation of curved folds with a triangular mesh from its crease pattern. The proposed method first approximates curves in a crease pattern with polylines and then generates a triangular mesh. In order to construct the discretized developable surface, the edges in the mesh are rearranged so that they align with the estimated rulings. The proposed method is implemented on an existing Origami Simulator that runs in a web browser. (project page)

We implemented the proposed method, shared it on GitHub, and asked Origami Simulator to include it as a curved folding support function (Github repository). Anyone can run simulations with SVG files of crease patterns including curves on Origami Simulator.