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I once challenged myself to do one of these, and failed miserably, not because it looked like nothing, the steering part was completed, but then the laziness and lack of motivation kicked in. It takes some special paper and no social life to do this, I spent hours on small parts.

I challenge anybody to do this and make it resemble to what the assembled model looks like. It’s a nice promotional campaign from Yamaha, you can either print colored or black and white parts if price is a problem. More models after the break.

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Happy new year and sorry for the absence… had to finish my school project. Here’s another great modular origami suggested by Castword. A spiked icosahedron made with Nick Robinson’s trimodules. It took me all holidays to fold it. You need 30 square papers for this one, I used 10cm paper and the final model is about 17cm from spike to spike. It might have looked better with 3 different colours.

At first, when assembling, it will not hold together very well, but once all the pieces are in place it’s pretty sturdy. You can also assemble it with less modules if you’re really fed up with folding. See the video after the break.

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After castword’s suggestion here’s a lesser stellar dodecahedron. It’s a modular model made from thirty 36 degree isosceles triangle units. You can also assemble 6 or 12 units. Diagrams here and a video plus some pictures after the break. Made by Meenakshi Mukhopadhyay.

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Here’s a different approach to origami. This model is made of strips of paper rather than a single paper or folded modules. It’s called a stamp machine (originally “Stampfmaschine” from German) because it can move - or more commonly known as “action model”. It consists of 16 cubes, each cube is made of 3 strips of paper, and everything is knotted together with more strips.

I used thicker paper (160g/m2) for the cubes because they had to be solid and normal paper (80g/m2) to knot them together. You’ll need 48 strips of 6 squares to make all the 16 cubes, 4 strips of 14 squares and 8 of 12 squares to knot them together (although the 14 and 12 square strips aren’t that accurate). You can get the diagrams/instructions to the cube here and the assembly here from Orihouse. A magnificent knotology by Heinz Strobl.

A few more pictures after the break.

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A sturdy and easy to fold modular origami, by Carmen Sprung. It’s the same basic model as the arabesque, simpler but harder to assemble. You can make an octahedron with 12 modules or an icosahedron with 30. The diagrams for it can be found on the authors website and the video of the how-to after the break.

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An origami arabesque, by Mio Tsugawa. An arabesque is an elaborative application of repeating geometric forms that often echo the forms of plants and animals (from Wikipedia). It requires 30 modules that take an hour each to make. You can find the diagrams directly on the authors website. I also made a variant with only 6 modules. Video and another image after the break.

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A very nice modular origami that has the possibility of being expanded: you can assemble 18 modules to make a truncated tetrahedron, 24 for a cuboctahedron, 30 for a dodecahedron like this one, 48 for a rhombicuboctahedron and so on. The modules are 120 degree units, by David Shall. I found the diagrams for it on this site. I think you can figure out what the assembling steps are, it took me about half an hour to assemble it so I couldn’t tape it all.

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Another modular origami, from David Brill. It’s a box inside another box, it’s actually made of 12 modules. This one is easier to assemble than the intersecting tetrahedra, but it takes much longer to fold the modules. Found in David’s book: Brilliant Origami.

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A modular box with its lid, by Tomoko Fuse. This one is harder and takes much longer to make than my other box, but it’s much nicer. You’ll need 4 square papers for the main box and another 4 for the lid, all the same size.

When doing the lid, notice that the paper isn’t folded in the center, this is to allow it to be bigger than the box.

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Here’s a tough one. It’s a wonderful modular origami by Thomas Hull, five tetrahedra inside each other. Modular origami takes more time to make than normal origami, but it looks much better. This modular is made of 30 simple pieces, making them takes about an hour and assembling it is pure hell.

This model takes 10 square papers that will have to be cut in three to have 3:1 ratio.

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