Twisted Stars Tessellation : Origami Tessellations

Twisted Stars Tessellation

I came up with this design and it was definitely legit from a structural perspective. All the folds worked together in perfect synchronicity.

It's a very tight design though, so actually folding it was a challenge. At first I had the hexes and the triangles all on the front. While I was able to complete the central module, the paper was practically dust by the time I started trying to collapse the surrounding repetitions.

So I decided to try moving the hex twists to the back of the design to make more room for the very closely packed triangle twists on the front.

It was still very difficult to fold. But that did do the trick.

It's definitely not a tessellation for the faint of heart.

But after some maniacal persistence I was able to finally coax the paper into the places I wanted it to go.

The funny thing is, it's a very humble looking pattern when you first draw it out. It looks like it will be easy. But because of the way the triangle twists overlap one another all of the connects are very dependent upon one another.

It's almost impossible to just fold a portion of the design and flatten it. After you get the center set, you have to half set the outer iterations and then keep going around and easing them all into place as a single unit.

First image is front side back lit, then rear back lit, then front unlit.

Somewhere I had a small crease pattern starter module. If I can find it, I'll post it here at a later date.

I found my starter crease pattern.

Here are some images of the crease pattern and partial collapses to illustrate how the design works. For the iterations you simply repeat the same central pattern off of each of the veins radiating from the triangle twists.

The first image is just a very simple pattern for one iteration. The successive images show the design in partial stages of collapse.

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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