On 8/19/09, Michael Kleber <michael.kleber@gmail.com> wrote:
... Nonsense! I have one in my hands now, printed from the planar net above, and it folds and unfolds with almost no effort. The key is that you need to start by creasing all the edges in the correct direction: most of them should be mountain folds, but the two long edges of the four big triangles (touching the squares on their third edge) should be valleys. (Maybe the lines should be drawn differently, as is origami-standard.)
Congratulations! [Guess I must be out of practice.]
... Perhaps the model would be improved if the two mostly-interior type-(b) vertices were augmented with a little bit of webbing -- not a full extra copy of the three other triangles that meet there, but just a small stub with (two valley) fold lines, that the counterpart faces can snuggle into when the whole thing is assembled.
Agreed. Unfortunately, apparently straightforward mods like this are rendered all but impossible by Maple's byzantine plotting architecture, which was evidently never actually designed but just growed like Topsy. Somehow, Maple has to be fooled into thinking that the net is either a function plot in 2-D, or a solid shape in 3-D ... I'll work on it. WFL