Flying Saucers Origami Tessellation

Origami Tessellation: Flying Saucers

The inspiration for this origami tessellation was alternating rhombuses and triangles around six sided 'pyramid' shapes. As I was plotting out how to repeat it, I wound up with small hexagon twists on the other side. 

When I went to fold it, I was thinking it was a pretty easy one. It is, provided you're familiar with how to nest six triangle twists around a small hex on the opposite side. 

I hadn't done that particular fold in a long time, but it all came back to me pretty quickly. Even with thin printer paper, I had no problem executing it very nicely. 

Had I realized before starting exactly how the design would fold (I had forgotten how this six triangle set looked in diagram form), I might've opted for thicker tant paper instead.  Which wouldn't have given me such a wonderful photo of the final product. 

Back view Flying Saucers Tessellation

That's the dilemma I often encounter when beginning a new tessellation. Which type of paper should I use. There's no debating that thinner papers backlight much more beautifully when you go to take the photo of the finished product. But not every design can be successfully folded with thin paper. 

As you become more skilled with each technique it does become easier to do trickier designs with weaker paper... to some extent anyway. There will always be some tessellations that absolutely require a denser paper no matter how good you are. 

And the weather plays a role as well. Low humidity vs high humidity will definitely affect how the paper responds to your advances. But it's not just the weather. It's also indoor heat and air conditioning that change how the paper responds. I find it so much easier to work with any type of paper when the heat or air conditioning is running. It just sucks all the moisture out of the air and out of the paper. Leaving me with a dry crisp, canvas for beautiful folding. 

When I was finished and saw the final result, it reminded me a lot of other tessellations I had done years ago that were created by Robin Scholz. He did a bunch using this six triangle twist configuration. He called them amizade designs.

I don't know if this is something he has done that I didn't see/don't recall or if it's something new that I've found. But I believe it is new to me. I don't think I've seen or done it before. 

It's a somewhat difficult tessellation, but it's not terribly tricky. 

Crease pattern included.

Crease pattern to fold Flying Saucers Origami Tessellation


Filed under: May 2025 Origami Tessellations
This has been an original post created by SolvingOrigamiTessellations.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Herringbone Tessellation

Image
Messing around with rhombuses yielded this interesting pattern. It utilizes reverse rabbit ear folds to create triangular points which connect the running rows of rhombus twists. The triangles form in the spaces between the rhombuses. Then there are mirror triangles to facilitate the the next row.  It kinda looks and folds like a square grid tessellation even though it's done using a triangle grid.  It's a fairly easy fold.  I do have a crease pattern. Just need to take a pic and upload it. Update: photo of crease pattern added below.
Read more

Natural Rhombus Herringbone Tessellation

Image
This is in keeping with my exploration of non-hexagonal twists repeating. It's just a dizzying array of rhombuses all linked to one another. It employs an up/down repetition pattern. The rhombus shapes are different from traditional rhombus twists as they follow the natural grid lines. This crease pattern is a natural flow of the same single shape ad infinitum. It takes advantage of the natural folds of a triangle grid to create an easy to fold collapse that results in a complex structure of repetitions. It's difficult and a little confusing trying to get all the collapses to flow in the same direction. Especailly at the edges where the shapes get truncated. You could potentially alternate directions as well. Or come up with other patterns. The folds go forward or back at your discretion. I often find it frustrating to see a folded tessellation and no crease pattern to accompany it. Depending on how the photo was taken, the lighting and the clarity, it can so...
Read more

Infinite Triangles Origami Tessellation

Image
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 cr...
Read more