Journal for Geometry and Graphics
Volume 16 (2012), No. 2, 185–194.

Column-shaped Origami Design
Based on Mirror Reflections
Jun Mitani
Graduate School of Systems and Information Eng’g, University of Tsukuba / JST ERATO
Tsukuba Ibaraki 305-8573, Japanemail: mitani@cs.tsukuba.ac.jp

Abstract. Origami, which is the construction of an object by folding a single
sheet of paper, has been studied in the fields of mathematics and engineering. Several software programs for designing origami shapes have been recently developed,and so we can now obtain a variety of shapes. However, the variations designedwith them are still limited. In this paper, we propose a new method for designingorigami based on the sweep and reflection operations. As an example, a columnshaped origami object with a relief structure is designed using our method. The
shape is defined by a profile polyline and a trajectory polyline that are input by
the user. We developed a system on which the user inputs and edits the polylines
to generate both the crease pattern and the 3DCG model of the origami object inreal time. With the tools implemented in our system, the user can design a wider
variety of shapes in a trial-and-error manner while seeing the effects of their operations. Thus, users can easily design stable and geometrically attractive shapes.
We indicate the effectiveness and the potential of our system by showing someexamples.
Key Words: Origami, crease pattern, mirror reflection, computational origami
MSC 2010: 52B70, 51N05, 68U05

1. Introduction
Origami is traditionally viewed as the art of making a 3D object by folding a single sheet ofpaper. However, the technology of origami is useful for engineering since it helps to reducethe volume of products by folding and fabricating products efficiently from flat sheet material.
Several software programs for designing the shapes of origami have been recently developed,
and so we can now obtain a variety of origami shapes. However, the variations designed withthem are still limited.
In related studies, the author proposed a method for designing three-dimensional origami
based on rotational sweep [3]. The internal shapes of the origami objects designed with thisISSN 1433-8157/$ 2.50 c 2012 Heldermann Verlag

186

J. Mitani: Column-shaped Origami Design Based on Mirror Reflections

method are limited to a solid generated with rotational sweep. The author together with T.
Igarashi proposed an interactive user interface for designing curved origami having planar
curved folds [4]. This approach is based on the fact that when a part of a developable surface
is reflected with a simple mirror operation, the resulting shape can be reconstructed with asingle sheet of paper without tearing. The user can interactively move a point on a surface
by mouse dragging and see the shape change accordingly.
In this paper, we propose a new system which combines the advantages of both rotational sweep and mirror reflection approaches. Column-shaped origami objects with a relief
structure, as shown in Fig. 1, are designed with a simple user interface on our system. The
algorithm is based on the abovementioned two approaches. The user inputs only the profile
curve and the trajectory curve, which are represented by polylines. When the user inputs
the curves on the screen, a crease pattern and a 3DCG model are generated automaticallyin real time. The shapes designed with this approach cover not only the cylindrical shapes
designed with ORI-REVO [5] but also other variations, such as the diamond pattern (Fig. 9).
It is possible to design origami objects that have the same topology as a disc or a tube. By
approximating a smooth profile curve by a set of tiny line segments, curved surfaces can beused in the design. The theory behind our system is simple and not new. However, we canexplore a variety of geometrically attractive origami shapes quickly and easily by providing
a well-conceived user interface. The proposed approach is flexible and applicable for a wider
range of origami objects.

(a)

(b)

Figure 1: (a) The crease pattern. (b) A photo of the fabricated origami.

2. Related work
When an origami object is unfolded, mountain and valley creases appear on the sheet ofpaper. The relation between the crease pattern and the folded shape has long been the targetof studies on the design of origami. Most of the methods for designing origami objects focus
on the geometry of the crease pattern. After computers became popular, it was possibleto design sophisticated origami objects by using software programs. A number of software
programs that generate crease patterns for origami have been developed, and now some usefultools are available on the Internet. The research field of designing origami with a computeris now called “computational origami”.
TreeMaker is software used to design flat foldable origami [2]. This software generates
crease patterns from a graph tree that represents the base structure of the object by using thecircle-river packing algorithm. Tess is software for designing a mosaic pattern that appears
when a sheet of translucidus paper is folded [1]. In this software, a crease pattern is generated

J. Mitani: Column-shaped Origami Design Based on Mirror Reflections

187

from a basic tiling pattern, selected from a predefined pattern list by the user, and some parameters. Origamizer is software that generates a crease pattern from an input 3D polygonalmodel [6]. By using Origamizer, an arbitrary 3D polygon model that is topologically thesame as a disc can be fabricated with a sheet of paper.
The software programs introduced in this section handle only straight creases and flat
surfaces. However, ORI-REVO [5] and our system can design an approximated curved surface.

3. Theoretical concept
The shape of the origami objects designed with our system is generated by applying reflection
operations to the initial developable surface. In this section, we describe the details of thebasic theoretical concept on which our system stands.
3.1. Initial developable surface
It is well known that surfaces that can be made with a single sheet of paper are limited only
to developable surfaces. We start with a developable surface to design the final shape. The
surface we use here as the initial surface is a cylindrical surface, which consists of an infinite
number of parallel straight lines. The cylindrical surface is defined as a swept surface whose
trajectory is a straight line. In our system, the profile curve, which is input by the user, isrepresented as a polyline lying on a vertical plane. We call this polyline the “profile polyline”
hereinafter. The trajectory is defined as a straight line lying on a horizontal plane perpendicular to the plane on which the profile polyline lies. Therefore, the initial surface is defined
as a set of rectangles, as shown in Fig. 2. A smooth curved surface can be approximated byusing a fine profile polyline that has many tiny line segments.

(a)

(b)

Figure 2: (a) An initial surface generated by sweeping a profile polyline (thick line)
along a trajectory line (arrow). (b) A curved initial surface approximated by a set ofthin rectangles.

3.2. Applying reflection operations
The surface obtained by applying a reflection operation to a part of the initial surface is asurface which has a crease (Fig. 3). The crease corresponds to the intersection between theinitial surface and the reflection plane. This surface can be physically made with a single
sheet of paper by folding the initial surface along the crease without tearing and distortion.

188

J. Mitani: Column-shaped Origami Design Based on Mirror Reflections

(a)

(b)

Figure 3: (a) A surface obtained by the reflection operation of a plane(denoted as a dashed square). (b) The top view of the surface.

Since any part of the surface even after this folding is still developable, the surface generated
by applying the reflection operation several times is always developable and can be made witha single sheet of paper. This is the basic operation we use for designing a new origami model.
3.3. Location and orientation of reflection planes
To design a shape, the reflection planes have to be appropriately located and orientated.
However, providing the user interface to control them intuitively is not straightforward. Furthermore, it is sometimes difficult to recognize the relation between the generated shape andthe location or orientation of the reflection plane, because a slight difference of the orientation causes a significantly different resulting shape. These problems motivated the author
and Igarashi to develop a system on which the location and the orientation of a reflection
plane are implicitly set when a user drags a point on the surface [4]. Our approach is similar
to their approach. In our system, the location and the orientation of a reflection plane areautomatically and implicitly defined by a polyline that the user inputs as a trajectory.
When the user inputs a polyline as a trajectory on a horizontal plane, the system locatesand orientates the reflection planes so that a ray reflected by them coincides with the trajectory. This means that each reflection plane is located so that a corner of the polyline lies
on it. Then the reflection plane is orientated so that its normal vector coincides with thebisector of the corner angle. Figure 4 illustrates the relation between the trajectory polyline(user input) and the reflection planes (system output). Since we constrain the trajectory pathso that it lies on a horizontal plane, all reflection planes are orientated vertically.
3.4. Construction of a 3D model
The system places the reflection planes by referring to the trajectory polyline. Then thesystem constructs a 3D model by reflecting the initial developable surface at every reflection
plane. Since the initial surface consists of a set of parallel lines, as shown in Fig. 2, the 3Dmodel is generated by reflecting it at every reflection plane, as shown in Fig. 5. To help theuser designing a new shape in a trial-and-error process, the system updates the 3D model inreal time as the user edits the trajectory.
The number of polygons constituting the 3D model is the product of the number of line
segments in both the profile polyline and the trajectory polyline. Therefore, the number can

J. Mitani: Column-shaped Origami Design Based on Mirror Reflections(a)

189(b)

Figure 4: (a) Reflection planes placed so that the reflected path coincides with the user
input of the polyline. (b) The path (large arrow) and the reflection planes (dashed line)in the top view.

Figure 5: Relation of the trajectory (arrow) and the line elements (thin lines) of the 3Dmodel reflected by the reflection planes (dashed lines) in the top view.

be a thousand at most, and it is small enough to construct and display the model in real timeon today’s PCs.
3.5. Generating a crease pattern
Since the 3D model is represented as a polygonal model, the development of the model isobtained by placing the polygons onto the 2D plane one by one.
However, the crease pattern of the 3D model generated with our system is obtained withsimpler algorithm. Because the polygons composing the 3D model generated our system are
all trapezoids, the crease pattern can be generated by simply adding skew line segments inthe parallel crease pattern of the initial model, as shown in Fig. 6. The distances between
neighboring skew lines are defined as the distances between the points where a line element
is reflected by a reflection plane. Note that the reflection operations do not change theinitial crease pattern: these operations just add new skew creases. Therefore, the pattern isgenerated quickly enough to follow interactive editing.

Figure 6: Relation of the 3D model (left) and the crease pattern (right).
The crease pattern fits inside the rectangle.

190

J. Mitani: Column-shaped Origami Design Based on Mirror Reflections

4. User interface
Since just two polylines, the profile polyline and the trajectory polyline, determine the 3D
shape, the system is quite simple. However, to produce easily both stable and attractive
shapes, a user interface for precisely controlling the polylines is required. In this section, we
describe the details of our system from the viewpoint of the user interface.
4.1. Rotational symmetry
Symmetry is essential for geometrical attractiveness. When the trajectory polyline has rotational symmetry and is closed (the start point and the end point are located at the sameposition), the resulting shape becomes a column-like shape whose cross section has rotationalsymmetry. Therefore, providing commands for designing the symmetrical trajectory is important. We prepared some templates, as shown in Fig. 7, so that the user can input asymmetrical trajectory polyline easily. By controlling parameters such as the radius and thenumber of corners, the user can obtain a variety of geometrically attractive shapes. Since theconcavity and convexity are flipped at the reflection plane located at a corner of the trajectory
polyline, the number of corners has to be even so that the start point and the end point meet.
The variation of shapes generated with this approach covers the cylindrical shapes designed with ORI-REVO.

Figure 7: Examples of templates for the trajectory path. The user can modify
the shape by controlling the parameters set to each template.

4.2. Position adjustment of the profile polyline
The position of the line elements of the initial surface relative to the trajectory polyline affects
the resulting shape, even though the shapes of both the trajectory polyline and the profile
polyline do not change. Figure 8 shows this effect. Illustrated as dashed lines at the left ofFig. 8(a), the location and orientation of the reflection planes are defined by the trajectory
polyline (a regular hexagon in this case). As illustrated in the right of Fig. 8(a), the pathsof the line elements of the 3D model (solid lines) differ according to the position relative tothe trajectory. Therefore, the same profile polyline and trajectory line generate a 3D modelof different shapes when their relative position changes.
Note that in Fig. 8(b) the top and the bottom of the profile polyline are located at thesame position vertically as the end point of the trajectory. This input makes the regularhexagonal openings of both the top and the bottom. In contrast, the openings of the top andbottom are a non-regular hexagon in Fig. 8(c). This figure shows the importance of position
adjustment of the profile polyline relative to the trajectory.

191

J. Mitani: Column-shaped Origami Design Based on Mirror Reflections

(a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 8: The trajectory polyline and reflection planes (left of (a)). The paths of theline elements of the 3D model defined by the reflection planes (right of (b)). The sameprofile polyline and trajectory line generates different shapes of the 3D model ((b), (c)).
A dot shows the point view of the trajectory polyline.

Figure 9: The diamond pattern, created with some degenerated line elements.

Hence, we added a user interface to our system to control the position of the profile polyline
relative to the trajectory after the user defines both shapes. By controlling the position so thatsome line elements degenerate (having zero length), we can design the well-known diamondpattern shown in Fig. 9.

5. Result
We implemented the algorithm and the user interfaces described in the previous sections witha Java application. The application is composed of four windows (Fig. 10).

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 10: Application windows of our system. These windows show (a) the profilepolyline, (b) the trajectory polyline, (c) the crease pattern, and (d) the 3D model.

192

J. Mitani: Column-shaped Origami Design Based on Mirror Reflections

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

Figure 11: Origami objects designed with our system. From left to right, each line shows
the profile polyline, trajectory polyline, 3D model, a part of crease pattern, and photoof the fabricated model.

J. Mitani: Column-shaped Origami Design Based on Mirror Reflections

193(a) A main window on which a user inputs a profile polyline.
(b) A top view window on which the user inputs a trajectory. The user can select a predefined trajectory pattern from the menu. The user can also input an arbitrary polyline
independently without using the patterns.
(c) A window that displays the crease pattern.
(d) A window that shows the 3D model. The user can rotate the model to see it from anarbitrary angle.
Figure 11 shows origami objects designed with our system. Some of the models have curved
surfaces approximated by a set of thin rectangles. Since we can omit the folding when a creaseis almost flat, the surfaces are reconstructed by moderately bending a sheet of paper. Mostof the models are column-like shapes designed with a closed trajectory, and they are stable
when fabricated. Figure 11(f) is an object whose trajectory is not closed.

6. Conclusion
We could design a variety of shapes quickly using our system. We believe these origamiobjects show that providing a well-conceived user interface makes it possible to easily explore
geometrically attractive origami.
The trajectory used in our system lies on a horizontal plane. Although this limitation
helps to simplify the user interface, the variety of shapes designed with this system is limited.
The trajectory does not actually need to lie on a plane to implement the algorithm. A more
complicated 3D model can be generated from a non-planar trajectory with the same algorithm
described in this paper. The origami object shown in Fig. 12 is an example designed by using
a non-planar trajectory. However, the expansion of the degrees of freedom causes difficulty incontrolling the 3D shape. Furthermore, we confirmed that a non-planar trajectory frequently
causes penetrations among polygons that are not allowed in fabrication. To find a reasonablebalance between the degrees of freedom and the ease of use is one of the topics we will addressin future work.

Figure 12: An origami object consisting of five layered components. Two large partsof them were designed by using a non-planar trajectory.

194J. Mitani: Column-shaped Origami Design Based on Mirror Reflections

References[1] A. Bateman: Paper Mosaic Origami Tessellations. http://www.papermosaics.co.
uk/software.html[2] R.J. Lang: TreeMaker. http://www.langorigami.com/science/computational/treemaker/treemaker.php[3] J. Mitani: A Design Method for 3D Origami Based on Rotational Sweep. ComputerAided Design and Applications 6 (1), 69–79 (2009).
[4] J. Mitani, T. Igarashi: Interactive Design of Planar Curved Folding by Reflection.
Proc. of the Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications 2011, pp. 77–81.
[5] J. Mitani: PRO-REVO. http://mitani.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/ori\_revo/[6] T. Tachi: Origamizer. http://www.tsg.ne.jp/TT/software/
Received August 3, 2012; final form November 28, 2012