Power Word Fold

…to the greatest Dungeon Master of them all. If not for E. Gary Gygax, many of the designs on this blog would simply not exist.


Horned Dwagon

Anyone asking “Who’s Gary?” will be struck by lightning for 100d6 damage, no saving throw.

Visiting relatives is always an eye-opening experience.

 
Really young cousin: Betcha can’t fold a billywig.
Me: Fold a what??!!

 
Turns out that billywigs are fictional bugs from some children’s storybook about a bunch of spoiled, self-centred and elitist brats. There’s not much information out there to build up a solid picture of what this critter looks like, so we’ll need to begin from scratch. What would such an insect look like?

Well, being an insect, it’s got to have six legs, a head, a thorax and an abdomen. The unique feature of the billywig is apparently a pair of wings at the top of its head; now, that’s a bit of a strange place to have true wings, but what if these wings arose from an exaptation of its antennae? The true wings themselves would, in this case, end up serving a different purpose, perhaps one of steering and fine control. With these in mind, perhaps billywigs would end up looking like this:

Flying female billywig;
Male billywig at rest with antennae-wings folded

The crease patterns themselves aren’t anything unusual. The CP for the male billywig is based on a 28×28 grid.






Male Billywig, packing pattern, partial CP and full CP

The female billywig has a nearly identical tree structure to that of the male:


Female Billywig crease pattern

Folding will resume once this monster lets go of the paper

Since folding a whole Nativity scene for the holidays sounds like too much work, here’s a reindeer instead:


A reindeer

The structure for this is rather simple, no surprises. The flaps for the front antlers can be split further if desired.




Circle packing and crease pattern

Meh. Boring, yeah?

Do not read any further if you are a purist!

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You have been warned!

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Snip!


Throw in a 555, an LED, some caps, some resistors…

reindeer.FLV
And plug it in!

Sometimes, when you’re busy with too many other things, your muse has to capture your attention in different ways.


A Gargoyle

How many truly different ways are there, really, to translate a humanoid tree figure into a packing pattern? This one’s from a 24×24 grid:


Square Packing


Partial CP


Full CP

The head region is subsequently narrowed further to give a better aspect ratio for the horns (these creases are not shown here).