Origami & Folding
what one sheet can do
Generator

What a flat sheet can become — the developable generator

A generator in the curves and material library, called 63 times across 16 essays. Below: what it draws at its defaults and at the arguments the essays give it, what it checked while drawing, and everywhere it is used.

developable is one function. Everything below came out of it during this build, at arguments taken from the essays rather than invented for this page — so a figure here is the same figure a reader meets in an essay, and when the generator changes, this page changes with it.

At its defaults

What a flat sheet can becomeA sheet that cannot stretch can only take shapes with zero Gaussian curvature everywhere — cylinders, cones and the general developable surface. A sphere or a saddle curves in two directions at once and no amount of folding reaches one, which is why a paper globe has to be made of gores.cylinderreachablecurved one way onlyconereachablecurved one way, from a pointsphereunreachablecurved two ways — impossiblesaddleunreachablecurved two ways — impossible

sub: "wet-folding"

What a few percent of stretch is worthThe strain a flat sheet has to take at its rim to be pulled into a spherical cap, against how much of a sphere the cap covers. Dry paper will give about one percent and reaches a cap of some fourteen degrees; wetting it buys a few percent more and perhaps another fifteen degrees. The theorem is not repealed by wet-folding — it is paid off, a little.5%10%15%15°30°45°60°75°90°strain the rim must takehow much of a sphere the cap coversdry paper1% of stretchreaches 14°damp paper3% of stretchreaches 24°wet-folded6% of stretchreaches 35°a hemisphere needs 36% and nothing made of cellulose is going to supply it

sub: "curved-crease", radii: [0.34, 0.52, 0.7]

A curved creaseOne curved fold in a flat sheet. The paper either side cannot stretch, so it is forced into a developable surface, and the sheet arrives at a doubly-curved shape that nobody put there. The flat-folding theorems say nothing about this case — they are statements about straight creases meeting at a point.the patternconcentric arcs, alternatingwhat the sheet doesa shape with no flat state at allthe curve is in the crease; the saddle is the paper refusing to stretch

which: [cylinder, cone]

The surfaces a flat sheet can takeThe shapes a sheet that cannot stretch is able to take: surfaces with zero Gaussian curvature everywhere, curved in one direction only. Every surface a curved crease produces is assembled from patches of these, which is why the classification is worth having on its own.cylinderreachablecurved one way onlyconereachablecurved one way, from a point

What it checked while it drew

Collected by running this generator with a listener on the assertions, not written here. The count is how many separate times this build put that claim to the test.

Where it is called

Changing this generator changes every figure on this list, which is what makes the list worth publishing rather than keeping in a check script.

A crease carries no curvature

A fold looks like the sharpest curvature a sheet could have, and intrinsically it has none at all. Developability — the first of the four conditions this site's checker runs — is exactly the statement that folding an uncut sheet creates no curvature anywhere, including at the creases.

A crease that curves

Bend a crease and the paper either side is forced into a shape nobody creased. The flat-folding theorems say nothing about it, because they are statements about straight creases meeting at a point.

A curve has no panels

A rigid folding is a finite list of flat pieces joined along lines. A curved crease has no such list, and refining one does not help: the kink at each joint falls as one over the segment count, and the total of the kinks does not fall at all, because it is a constant of the curve.

A sheet that grows cannot lie flat

A leaf does not decide to buckle. Growth changes the distances between a sheet's own material points, a set of distances determines a curvature, and a curvature that is not zero cannot be laid in a plane by anything — whatever the sheet is made of and however slowly it grew.

A straight tuck is a cone point

A tuck with straight edges hides length in proportion to how far past its start it has gone, which is a cone's law and not a sphere's. Started at the centre, straight tucks make a cone. Started at several radii, they hide length in a broken line that follows a sphere's cubic, and the worst shortfall falls as the square of the number of starting radii: 36.9 per cent of the rim's hiding from one start, 12.3 from two, 3.3 from four, 0.8 from eight. Every start is three creases at a point, which is a vertex that cannot fold flat — and it is exactly where the gathered sheet's curvature goes.

A tuck keeps what a gore cuts

A flat disc gathered into a spherical cap has more circumference than the cap, and a gore removes the excess while wet-folding stretches it away. A tuck folds it under, which keeps the sheet whole and turns the excess into thickness. At the rim of a gathered cap the paper is α ⁄ sin α sheets thick on average — π⁄2 for a hemisphere — and a simple tuck is three, so single tucks reach a cap of 130.6° before they run into one another. And because a sphere's circles fall short of a plane's as the cube of the radius, a tuck that follows the sphere widens as the cube too: its edges are curves.

Crowd the tucks toward the rim

Straight tucks started at several radii follow a sphere's hidden length in a broken line, and evenly spaced starts leave a worst shortfall that falls as the square of their number. Evenly spaced is not the best spacing. A sphere's hiding bends hardest near the rim, so the best starts crowd outward — on a hemisphere, four of them at 0.36, 0.60 and 0.80 of the radius — and leave 38 per cent less error than four evenly spaced. As the count grows the saving closes on 42 per cent, a limit set by the square root of how the sphere's hiding bends; on a shallow dish it approaches five ninths. To follow a hemisphere within one per cent takes six rings of tucks instead of eight, and within a tenth of a per cent eighteen instead of twenty-four.

Crowding outward costs almost nothing

Placing the tuck starts for equal error crowds them toward the rim, where the gathered paper is already at its thickest, and the obvious worry is that the accuracy is bought with depth. Measured, it is not: on a hemisphere the crowded placement's deepest start sits in 3.37 sheets against the even placement's 3.32, because a start is three sheets of its own and the gathering beneath it is only one and a half.

Paper that stretches on purpose

Wet-folding breaks the assumption every theorem of flat folding rests on, deliberately. It does not repeal the geometry — it buys a few percent of strain, and a few percent of strain is worth about twenty degrees of sphere.

The gap between two curves

The rulings leaving a curved crease are not parallel, so they cross, and the surface exists only as far as the first crossing. That bound is usually read as a limit on how far a design extends outward. It is not: the paper between two curved creases has to be reachable from both, so the bound bites hardest where the circles are smallest, and a concentric pleat has a hole in the middle that no sheet size removes.

The sculptors got there first

Curved-crease folding produced its best objects decades before anybody could compute one. The surfaces were made by hand, the ruling lines that determine them were not calculated until much later, and the mathematics has been catching up ever since.

Three answers, one count

Seams, curved creases and a few per cent of stretch are the three ways round the sphere, and a tuck is a fourth. All four dispose of one quantity — the excess circumference a flat disc has over the sphere's circle — and all four dispose of it by dividing the circle. So the number of divisions needed is the same whichever answer is chosen: nineteen for a hemisphere in a material that gives two per cent, eight at five, four at ten. What differs is what a division costs, and one of the four runs out.

What a flat sheet can become

A sheet that cannot stretch cannot become a sphere. That much belongs to differential geometry; what belongs to folding is the three ways round it — seams, curved creases, and a few percent of stretch — and what each one costs.

What one cut buys

A fold moves paper about and cannot change how much of it surrounds a point. A cut can, and that one difference is the whole of what this site's founding rule is worth. Take a wedge out and the sheet closes into a cone; let one in and it has more paper than the plane will accept.

Where a ring of divisions belongs

A pattern that divides the circle everywhere as finely as its rim requires is over-divided for most of its radius, because the excess grows from nothing. Putting a ring of new divisions in wherever the residual would otherwise pass what the material takes gives seven rings on a hemisphere at five per cent of stretch, at 0.35, 0.50, 0.62, 0.72, 0.81, 0.90 and 0.98 of the way out — and the first of those sits where a completely different criterion put its first tuck start.

Where the rulings run out

A curved fold's surface is made of straight lines leaving the crease, and the lines are not parallel, so they cross. Past the first crossing there is no surface: two points of the paper have been sent to one point of space. The boundary is a curve nobody drew, no crease pattern shows it, and it sits at the sine of the ruling angle times the crease's own tightest radius — on every curve tried.

Every generator · The curves and material field · The patterns a reader can fold