Simulating curved folding without planar quads?

[DanielPiker]

It’s true that predefining the ruling lines limits the folding.
Lots of curved folding actually relies on the ruling directions changing as it folds, which the planar quads method can’t capture.
Using a triangulated mesh as a shell can sometimes be a better way. See these threads on this:

Tessellation Origami

One tricky thing about curved folding origami is the interaction of the mesh edge directions and the ruling lines (paper stays very close to a developable surface, so the curvature in one direction will be zero). If you know the ruling directions, you can model curved fold origami as thin planar quads. (See this paper: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~niloy/research/folding/folding_sig_08.html) However, what makes it tricky is that the direction of these ruling lines often isn’t obvious from the …

Plywood Strips twisting and bending simulation

Hi Sotiris, Sorry @agakorz14 I missed this discussion the first time around. For an initially flat strip like this where the thickness is very small in relation to the width, the deformed shape should closely approximate a developable strip. There is unlikely to be significant in-plane bending or stretching. If we are just considering the shape it bends/twists into for a certain combination of end positions/orientations, and it is not significantly affected by self weight, then this shape doe…