MODULAR ORIGAMI BALL 12 UNITS HOW TO

If you’re an origami purist, then you make kusudamas without any sort of glue, tape, or string to hold the units together. They were originally used for incense and potpourri, which I guess is where the name comes from. The word “kusudama” literally means “Medicine Ball” when translated from Japanese. Figuringout where to put the colors is a puzzle,but not too hard, for the dodecahedron and theobject in (2).Kusudamas are modular origami models where multiple units are fit together to form a ball-like shape. This is called a proper 3-edgecoloring of the polyhedron.

(3) Make these objects using only three differentcolors, so that no two units of the same colortouch. (2) If 90 units is too scary for you, use 36 unitsto make a polyhedron with 12 pentagon facesand 2 hexagon faces. (1) Make a soccer ball, aka truncated icosahedron,aka Buckminster fullerene, aka C60 molecule fromthis unit. Until I write more about these subjects,think about the followingexercises: I also have been exploring different ways you can colorthem. In the next few weeks (ormonths?) I hope to add more to these pages abouthow to make bigger things and how many units ittakes. There are many different structures that can bemade from this unit. To make it, keep adding units ontoyour first three, but when you see five units goingaround a face, link them up to complete the face.This will make each face a pentagon, and willgive you a dodecahedron. It is the smallest structure that can be madefrom this unit. The above objectis a dodecahedron made from 30 pentagon-hexagonZ-units. Thus, the polyhedra madefrom this unit will look like polyhedral 'frames'where only the edges are visible.

MODULAR ORIGAMI BALL 12 UNITS HOW TO

Thus began my quest to seeexactly what other polyhedra you could make with thisunit and, later on, how to properly 3-color them.īut first let's see how to fold and lock the PHiZZ unitstogether.Īdding units to your first three will begin to make a polyhedron, where each unit represents an edgeof the polyhedron. But then I noticed that the locking mechanism in this unitis particularly strong, allowing one to make muchlarger structures. The unit itself is very simple, and the first thing I made with it was a dodecahedron. But for this exposition I'lljust stick to the above rules.) Or you could make the vertices have degree 4 (I know of two ways youcan do this), and that's interesting too. But the units tend to buckle when forced to do this. has only pentagon and hexagon faces (the faces need not be regular).(Of course, you can break these rules in various ways, say, by makingsquare faces.is cubic - each corner of the polyhedron has three edges meeting it, and.I call it this because you can use it to make any polyhedron that The unit I've been using extensively is what I call the pentagon-hexagon zig-zag unit (or PHiZZ unit). Lots of modular origami unitsexist that fall into this category, units by creators suchas Robert Neale, Lewis Simon, Jeannine Mosely, andJun Maekawa, just to name a few. Of course, other folds in therectangle are needed to make the flaps hook and stay,but that's the basic concept. The short ends of the rectangle become theflaps, and the layers at the sides created by the accordionfolds become the pockets. That is, you accordionpleat a square, typically into 4ths or 3rds, making arectangle. Zig-Zag units aremodular origami folds whose locking mechanismis based on an accordion pleat. Origami Math Pentagon-Hexagon Zig-Zag (PHiZZ) Unit Over the past several years I've been playing with a certain member of the Zig-Zag family ofmodular origami units.

Modular origami ball 12 units