11 Levels of Origami: Easy to Complex | WIRED

hi I'm Robert J lang origami artist and physicist today I've been challenged to go through levels of complexity with origami there's many ways to define complexity for origami it could be the total number of folds in the design it could be the number of folds you have to bring together at once I'm going to use a combination of those two measurements and illustrate it by going through different levels of complexity in a cicada one of the classic traditional subjects of origami as a disclaimer this is my interpretation of complexity as it applies to origami cicadas are very familiar in the Japanese culture in part because in summertime they make a huge racket not just in the countryside but even in downtown Tokyo the sound of cicadas can be deafening within the origami world they have a particular significance because Yoshizawa the great Japanese origami master considered his own cicada to be his greatest creation and so many origami artists have felt the need or the desire to create their own version of this iconic insect my level one would be the traditional Japanese cicada because it's one of the simplest folds in all of origami it's just a handful maybe one two three four five six seven eight steps all simple folds and yet it reads very strongly as a cicada this can be folded by almost anyone in just a few minutes it consists of nothing but Valley folds the simplest fold in all of origami although it only has a handful of folds there's a few places where you can put your personal stamp on it by making judgment folds folds that don't have a specific reference point in particular the angle at which you fold down the wings and then the angles at which you fold down these two corners on the top are done pretty much by eye by adjusting those folds positions a person can adjust the character in the finished shape of their cicada for level two this is a little bit more complicated because it incorporates a few more judgement folds but notably it has a fold called a petal fold that petal fold is built from two folds called swivel phones well start the same way in fact this will be based pretty much on the traditional cicada but now we want to do a few things differently we'd like to make the wings longer if I fold it down with a valley-fold that's all the length I can get from my wing if I'm willing to do a more complicated fold I can get longer wings and that more complex fold is called a swivel fold and so what with my more complicated fold I'm gonna move it down and create this little pocket which I will then flatten when I fold the flap down I'll have to fold it underneath the pocket here if I do that fold it down and then tuck some of it underneath and that's a mountain fold and then the last little bit is like fold Valley fold down but then fold and paper back I'm gonna leave a little bit of color exposed here and the reason I'll do that is that when I then fold the edges inside same as I did before my cicada will have colored eyes so although this is still quite stylized geometric a little bit abstract I think it's closer to the form of a real cicada and it reads a little bit better as a cicada for level 3 we're still doing a fairly simple abstract cicada but we've added a few more folds of complexity and we've added some squash folds which allow us to shape the wings relative to the abdomen and give a little bit more of a teardrop shape which matches the wing shape of an actual cicada I'll do a squash fold lift a flap up I put my finger inside press it flat that's a new fold it actually combines making multiple folds because I'm creating a full here and here at the same time that I'm bringing it down it's a combination fold but that allows us to achieve a little bit more shaping we're adding what are called crimp folds which led us both create distinct eyes and also give the body a little bit of three-dimensional roundedness so I'm gonna do a crimp that's putting a valley and a mountain right next to each other and the mirror image on the backside so there's the crimp on the front do the same on the back press them to set the crimp and then I'm gonna fold corners underneath which will lock the crimp in place and then that also allows me to open model help as we add details to the origami design we travel along a continuum from abstract to highly realistic this is my level 4 design which is a cicada designed by the great Akira Yoshizawa from this point onward the folding is sufficiently complex that I'm not gonna fold them from start to finish but I'll fold through until we can see the base and the basic structure the reason we have such a big jump from 3 to 4 is we're going from representations without legs to representations with legs a cicada has six legs so our number of legs needs to make a big jump right there go from 0 to 6 so just as we need to make a big jump in the number of legs we'll also need to make a big jump in the complexity of folding this level for design by Yoshizawa he used a rectangle that takes 8 bird bases and put them together into a rectangle this is the crease pattern for the bird base and you see this star-shaped motif and that little star shaped motif is repeated 8 times in this crease pattern that when folded looks like this so a row two across and eight along makes it possible to fold this fairly complex base but it has enough flaps to get all of the legs as well as the wings and other features at the cicada this is my level 5 design it's a cicada and I developed back in the 1980s it coincidentally shares a lot of its structure with Yoshi Ozawa's and that it's built from a rectangle that has an array of bird base patterns but the next step in this march of realism will be to put in the antennae even though the antennae are quite small on a cicada they're definitely noticeable and so we do that by adding two more bird bases to the pattern in the rectangle make the rectangle a little bit longer add a few more features and then we can get antennae as well as eyes wings and legs so one of the steps up in creating the base we have to fold some layers together and then unwrap one layer that's that's wrapped around another this layer is wrapped around another and then I unwrapped it so that it comes down this layer gets turned up that gives another base that's pretty similar to the OSHA Sawa base but it has two long flaps and crucially the addition of two small points one here and one here and so this step of unwrapping is the next step in this sequence of cicada designs this is my level six now even though rectangles started to become pretty common in the 60s and 70s the 1980s in the world of origami people felt like it was an aesthetically desirable thing to use squares most traditional origami designs came from squares there's a certain geometric elegance to a square so even though rectangles allowed us to create more complex shapes like cicadas with legs and antennae we thought can we do that from a square but getting points like legs long skinny appendages that come from the interior of the paper require quite a bit more in the way of both planning and design and also in the complexity of the folding steps themselves this design used some additional folds we haven't seen yet called rabbit ear fold and they're pretty easy but it also required a fold called a closed unwrap and a closed sink and these are now quite famous in the world of origami for their difficulty we wrap a layer from back to front these are pretty difficult to do without ripping the paper it's called a closed sink I'm going to put this point inside in a way that locks the edges together I have to do that by opening it up a little bit and refolding and when I'm done the point is gone and there's a little pocket and the edges are locked together but the reason we use them is it allows us to create combinations of points and flaps that in this case will give us the legs that we want from a square this is my level seven design and we can also do a side by side to this one to see how things improve but it's folded completely differently from level six one of the things I would like to do to increase the realism is to make all of the legs very thin and delicate have none of them come from the interior of the paper but the only way to ensure that happens is to start planning the design from the beginning so that the legs don't come from the center and to do that we use a new technique called circle packing in which all of the long features of the design are represented by circles so each leg becomes a circle each wing becomes a circle and things that can be big and thick like the head or the abdomen can be points in the middle the basic folds of origami like mountains and Valley folds have had names for years decades and some of the other combinations of two or three mountains and valleys have also been given names like reverse fold or rabbit ear but as we move up the level of complexity we find that we need to start putting together groups of folds in unique ways that have never been done before and so these folds don't even have names because you might not encounter that exact combination ever again but in many cases these new combinations of folds arise when we're trying to create a new point from somewhere in the interior of the paper and that happened in this design which bumps it's level of complexity up one more than the previous this is level eight shizuka cicada it's one step up from level seven because it has even thinner more delicate legs and more graceful teardrop shaped wing this required yet another new design in all the previous designs we could fold the model sequentially start with a square do one step at a time maybe do a few folds at a time but we could break the folds down into a sequence but in some designs you might have tens or even hundreds of folds that all have to come together at once and when that happens we call that a collapse I've got my six legs here two flaps four wings a long flat for the body these cross pleats would be used to segment the body that's some extra paper up here for the head and I can use these corners to create antennae and there's our finished shizuka cicada for my level 9 version of a cicada I thought we would move to a juvenile cicada because it has some additional features that demand additional complexity one is that a new cicada has proportionately longer legs so we need to get longer flaps but we still have to make them very very skinny but most notably it has a lot more structure on the claws it's got a appointed front claw and then a spine at the base of each claw we can also add segments distinct segments for the abdomen to make this happen we go again to the technique of box pleating or square packing and this time we'll have a lot more little figures a lot more squares a lot more objects to pack to get all these small features the spines the eyes the scale that gives rise to a more complex crease pattern one that has more folds and then that fold too requires a collapse to bring it all together we have a square or a rectangle for every little pointy bit on the shape so we have little squares for the spines a little space for the claws large ones for the legs small ones for the antennae and so forth and we have to pack all of those into the square and then from that packing we construct the crease pattern that has not only more up and down on side-to-side poles and that therefore gives rise to this crease pattern with more folds and a more complicated collapse this is my level 10 design which is a flying cicada and what makes this more complex now is that it has four major flaps that come from the interior of the paper head flap abdomen and two of the legs the reason we need those extra flaps is because now it's flying we need for really large flaps to make the wings cicadas at four wings four large wing flaps are take up most of the side edges of the paper and so then we have to get other features from the interior of the square the folds that generate those middle points are harder they're more complex and the fact that we have four of them now more than we've ever had before is what puts this into the next level of complexity my level eleven design is a cicada we're back to the classic pose but this deceptively simple design actually has the most complex folds of everything we've done before just in terms of the design this is actually a step backward in complexity because it's just an array of bird bases but in terms of the complexity of actually folding this is the most complex of anything that we've looked at it contains clothes sinks mixed sinks mixed raps combinations of all these folds and a very large number of them so many many individual folds those middle points require much more complex folds than any of the steps that we've done leading up to this and that's what makes this the highest level in this series those are my levels of complexity you might have your own levels for origami or whatever your pastime might be I want to thank Wired for giving me this opportunity and wish all of you happy folding

Channel: WIRED

Views: 3,081,297

Rating: 4.9521108 out of 5

Keywords: origami, robert j lang, origami artist, levels of, levels of origami, how to do origami, origami cicada, cicada origami, origami how to, how to origami, cicada opus, cicada opus 676, flying cicada origami, origami flying cicada, cicada opus 337, simple cicada, simple cicada origami, how to make a cicada, how to make an origami cicada, origami bug, artist origami, robert j lang origami, origami robert j lang, rjl, petal fold cicada, origami making, origami maker, wired

Id: MDwPXRy9IFc

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/buu11235]

That was amazing

[u/MyCoffeeIsCold]

It amazing when someone can analyze a subject matter and logically apply a structure that you have never considered. This was a great post!

[u/tralfamadelorean31]

Brilliant video. RJL always knows how to find and show us the common denominator. He's truly a genius.

[u/Illbringthefunk]

That was awesome. Thanks

[u/FroodLoops]

Great video! If you find this interesting and want to know more, I highly recommend Lang’s book “Origami Design Secrets”. It’s a hefty textbook style book that breaks down the theory, techniques, and mathematics behind complex origami design. It goes much deeper into his “circle packing” design techniques and others he mentions in the video.

[u/-Almado]

Before watching the video i thought i was pretty decent. Turns out the one cicada i've folded is only the lvl 7. Man, box pleating looks intimidating...