Our assignment was to create, out of origami, an object that represents ‘progress’. I have always been fascinated by nature’s ability to form geometry shapes out of atoms to molecules, an interesting example of this would be the bucky ball.

I chose to create the geodesic sphere origami using the laser cutter. To me, the sphere in many aspects represents progress because of its constant repeating faces, the more faces the object encompassed the more sphere it becomes. However the object also holds elements of failure, because although the more faces the object has the more sphere-like it will become, it will never become a sphere, which has only one face.

(From: Google Warehouse) 

Ferris Wheel Movement.flv

“The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.”

Many of the 3d models you find in Google 3D Warehouse and Thiniverse will be too complex for folding.

This article describes a technique for reducing the number of polygons in the mesh.  It involves downloading a free program called MeshLab (available for OS X and Windows).  Follow these steps:

1. Download the model in SketchUp format from the 3D
2. Open the model in Rhino, Export the file as a “.obj” file (just as you do for opening it in Pepakura)
3. Open the .obj file in MeshLab and follow the instructions in the above article
4. Save the new/reduced mesh as “.obj” and continue wtih this file in Papakura

With this technique, I was able to take this model of a hand from the Google 3d Warehouse

and reduce it to this:

 Which I was then able to unfold with Pepakura, far more reasonably: