Here’s a geodesic sphere made from paper – the largest origami construction I’ve made so far. It’s made using a dirt-simple folding technique called ‘snapology‘, based on strips of paper rather than squares. To be precise, these images are of an isocehedral degree 5 type I geodesic. The first challenge in putting one of these together is getting the lengths of all the edges (the chord factors) correct. I used the GPL’d DOME package to calculate lengths, and then used a few Python scripts to generate printable SVG cut-and-fold designs for the strips. The second challenge is the insane amount of cutting and folding.
Unfortunately, the Applied Synergetics site (home of the DOME software) appears to have gone offline and is now being occupied by a squatter. Various repositories keep the package alive, as a bit of digging with Google will reveal. C. J. Fearnley has more about geodesic spheres in his excellent Buckminster Fuller FAQ.
Higher-quality images will follow at a later date; these were taken using a camera phone of inferior resolution.
5 replies on “Geodesic Origami”
[…] The white, central polyhedron is an isocehedral degree 3 type I geodesic sphere. (As with the degree 5 version in a previous post, I used a computer to get the chord factors […]
i did something like this with tape and construction paper when i was in college – same color scheme even.
the “DOME” program is avaiable in the debian repository, though it has been marked as orphaned for a couple years.
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/dome
oops. i meant to ask if you would publish the python scripts.
Hi, fenn, thanks for the comments and interest.
I just dug up the scripts, and at the moment they are a wonderful object lesson as to why it’s a really, really good idea to comment one’s code. I’ve meant to get them cleaned up and published, but as you can see from the date on the post, this hasn’t been too successful at climbing to the top of my list.
I’ll try to add a few comments to the code and I’d be happy to send you a copy…with sufficient tenacity, it would be possible to figure them out. It’ll be a couple of days before I can sit down and get them sorted out.
don’t bother cleaning up the source. the important thing is that you actually publish it; even better if you release it under an open source license.