Rhombic Star Swarm Origami Tessellation : Origami Tessellations

Rhombic Star Swarm Origami Tessellation

I saw this tessellation somewhere. I can't remember where now. But I liked it enough to figure out how to fold it.

Little did I know when I started that it was a flagstone tessellation. I should've known, but I didn't find that out until I started puzzling out its construction.

. They can be a pain. And this one was.

There was a lot of pre-folding. That was 90% of the work.

After that, it was a matter of slowly coaxing all those pre-folds into their proper places. It was not an easy task. It was however, a very pleasing result.

It's a series of hexagon twists on the back of the paper. Then you go to the other side and surround them with rhombuses. Some large triangles allow everything to lay neatly together.

The gender of the folds was quite important in achieving the final collapse. Having the right valley and mountain folds was critical. The hexes had to go to the back. The rhombuses had to go to the front. The connective triangles also had to go to the back. All the rhombuses twist in the same direction. All the hexes twist in the same direction. The triangles don't really twist. They just sort of collapse as they connect the hexes and rhombuses.

It was a difficult and rewarding challenge.

When I began, I thought the hard part would be determining how to fold it. As I progressed, I realized, the actual execution of the design was the trickiest part.

A rewarding puzzle to solve. A stunning result.

Comments

Infinite Triangles Origami Tessellation

This is just a flash idea I had. There was no planning involved. No inspiration. I just started folding and followed the lure of the creases in the paper. Upon seeing the finished result, It kind of reminds me of Robin Scholz's Triphilia tessellation, but the construction is definitely different and I was not thinking of that as I was crafting it. The similarity is that you can arrange the layering of the triangles into different patterns of your choice. I went looking and discovered I had folded this a few years ago and called it Triangle Temptations . I didn't realize this until after I'd completed this model. Apparently, according to my original post, I'd seen someone else fold it on flickr and recreated it. This happens sometimes. You hit on an idea and it's something you've done and forgotten. They linger in the back of your brain and come forward unexpectedly. That previous version differed from this one slightly, in that it used double sized cross g

Micro Rhombus Stars Origami Tessellation

This tessellation is micro rhombus star twists. I'm pretty sure I've seen this done with larger size rhombuses, but not with ones this size. They are the smallest natural rhombuses of the triangle grid. The center is achieved by collapsing a small hexagon. On the other side there are small hex twists and open back triangle twists. Since the shapes are rather small, it's a little bit difficult to fold. It's probably more of a cool weather tessellation. Humidity does the paper no favors on such small designs. But the ideas come when they do. Reverse view and crease pattern images follow.

What If Caviar Could Talk Variant

This origami tessellation is a variant of one by Arseniy K. He named his 'What If Caviar Could Talk'. After I had solved his design, I decided that I wasn't up to reproducing it exactly as he had folded his. Perhaps another time, in the future. So I changed things up a little to make it slightly less difficult. Both designs have a foundation of open back hex twists with triangle twists around them, He used micro rhombuses between the repeats. In my case, I used larger natural rhombuses instead. Still a difficult fold to execute, but much less so. It still required thick paper. I used tant folded into a 32 pleat triangle grid. You can see from the photo of the reverse side how densely packed everything is. It's a few layers deep. So be prepared to wrestle with that. My crease pattern for this iteration is included at the end. To fold his, sub out small natural rhombuses in place of my larger ones.

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