Tess Documentation.

By Alex Bateman 2002

The Tess Program – Documentation version 1.2

Introduction

The Tess program was written to help design Origami Tessellations. An Origami
Tessellation is made by taking a simple unit crease pattern and copying it many times
across the paper. This style of origami was developed in the 1970s principally by
Shuzo Fujimoto and Yoshide Momotani. In more recent years this style has been
developed further by Paulo Barreto and Chris Palmer. An example crease pattern for
an Origami Tessellation is shown below. Working out these crease patterns is a hard
job to do. However Tess helps you design these patterns rapidly on your computer
and print out the crease pattern to fold at your leisure.

An extra feature of the Tess programs are that they also allow you to see what the
crease pattern will look like when it is folded up as shown below.

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Making Origami Tessellations

There are many different algorithms (or recipes) for making crease patterns for
Origami Tessellations. Paulo Barreto and Chris Palmer developed the one that is used
in the Tess programs. This algorithm is presented in outline below. Given a starting
tiling there are three steps to making an Origami Tessellation crease pattern:
(1) Generate tiling, the filled dots are the origin of scaling and rotation
(2) Scale polygons of tiling and generate a new “baby” polygon, shown shaded
(3) Rotate polygons to generate final pattern.

Parameters used to make variations

As you can see from the above method to make tessellations you have to rotate and
scale the polygons. Doing this by different amounts will give rise to completely new
Origami Tessellations.

In the Tess programs we use two parameters to specify these variations. One is called
the pleat angle and the second is called the pleat ratio.

The pleat ratio is the ratio of the lengths of the edges of the two polygons with
double-headed arrows. The pleat angle is the angle between these two edges.

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Generally if you keep the pleat angle less than 30 degrees then the tessellations should
be foldable. For larger values this may not always be true.

Installing Tess

Many people around the world have successfully installed the Tess software on their
computers. This includes PCs, Linux and Unix operating systems. If you are a PC
user then you should install Cygwin that gives your computer a Unix like
environment when you run it (Freely available from http://www.cygwin.com/). If the
following instructions make no sense to you whatever then you should find someone
you know with some computer expertise to help you as I don’t have time to help.

1. To install Tess you will need to have the perl language installed! You can test
if you have it by typing:

which perl

If perl cannot be found you need to install it.

2. Download tess tarfile, see above.

3. untar file using command:

tar -xvf tess.tar

4. You should now be able to run the tess program. Test using the following
command:

./command.pl -help

If you don't get the help message, you may need to change the first line of the
program to point at your version of perl. Or perhaps the file is not executable.
Try typing:

chmod +x command.pl

Try executing the program with the following

perl -e command.pl -help

If that works you are ready to run the command line version of the program.
Here are a few example cases:

./command.pl -geometry 1 -angle 22.5 -ratio 2 -output 1.ps

./command.pl -geometry 5 -angle 22.5 -ratio 3 -output 2.ps

./command.pl -geometry 2 -angle 30 -ratio 0.58 -output 3.ps

5. To view the output postscript files, you may need to install a viewer program
such as ghostscript.

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6. (Optional) If you have PerlTK installed you can use the GUI version of the
program. To run that type:

./gui.pl

Using command.pl - The Command Line Interface

The command line interface to the program gives you access to most of the
functionality of Tess. To run the program you have to provide a few arguments. The
absolute minimum is

./command.pl -geometry 1 -angle 20 -ratio 1

This command will make a postscript file called foo.ps with the crease pattern for an
origami tessellation. The geometry argument is a number that specifies a particular
geometry. These can be found by typing

./command.pl –help

or looking in the following table. The nomenclature used is explained in Grunbaum

and Shepherd’s excellent book Patterns and Tilings (ISBN:0-7167-1998-3).

Geometry number Description

1 4.4.4.4 (checkerboard pattern)
2 6.6.6 (Honeycomb pattern)
3 3.3.3.3.3.3
4 4.8.8
5 3.6.3.6
6 3.4.6.4
7 4.6.12
8 3.4.3.12; 3.12.12
10 9.9.6.4π9 Star tiling
11 4.6.4π6.6 Star tiling
12 8.4π4.8.4π4Star tiling
13 4.8.8 decomposed
14 9.9.6.4π9 decomposed Star tiling
15 Crystal
17 4.8.8 decomposed version 2
19 Kites
99 Simple twist fold (use –n parameter to
specify number of sides of polygon)

The –angle argument describes the pleat angle (see above).The –ratio argument
describes the pleat ratio parameter (see above).

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Using gui.pl - The Graphical User Interface

Probably the best way to use Tess is with the Graphical User Interface (GUI). This
allows you access to the widest range of functions. As you can see from the
screenshot below you can even view what the tessellations look like when they are
folded up.

Essentially to use the GUI you need to follow these steps:

(1) Select a tiling. Select one from the geometry menu

(2) Edit the tiling if you want to (best not to at first). See section below for help on
this.
(3) Hit the Origamify button to make the tiling into a crease pattern
(4) Play around with the parameters until you get a crease pattern you are happy
with.
(5) Print out pattern to a postscript file.
(6) Clear canvas, using option in File menu before starting to make your next
tessellation.

Editing a tiling

Really the only tricky part of Tess is editing of tilings. So this section guides you
throught doing this. Once you have selected a tiling from the geometry menu you can
make changes to that tiling. This expands the number of variations you can make
hugely. In the following example we have selected the 4.8.8 geometry. Now select
Action found in the Select menu. This will give you the following Action selection
window.

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The two editing actions allowed are decompose and crystal. We will select
decompose. Now click on one of the tiles in the canvas and see what happens.

See how the tile has been decomposed into 8 triangles. Alternatively we could have
selected the crystal button. The box in the right allows you to edit the parameters that
the crystal action uses. The default is 0.5 but you could also try 0.4,0.4,0.4 (this
comma separated list should not have any spaces!). The results of both these choices
are shown below.

You can take any of these tilings and press the Origamify button to make a crease
pattern.

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Show Centres
An important part of making an Origami Tessellation are the definition of the centres
of rotation. You can view these by switching on the Show Centres option. See below
for an example of this.

Fill Patterns
You will also notice that you can select Show Fill. This colours in each of the original
tiles in a variety of colours based on what creases they have. The baby tiles that are
generated in the Origamify step are coloured black. The pleats between these
polygons are white. See below for an example showing the fill colouring of an
Origami tessellation.

These colourings are not really very useful to you. They can be useful when working
out the correct crease assignment for a newly designed geometry.

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Light Patterns

In Tess you can see the folded pattern of a tessellation simply by making the pleat
angle negative. Once you have a folded pattern you can also see what the tessellation
will look like when held up to the light. This is called the light pattern. Below is an
example of what happens when you select the light pattern option (using the tower
geometry).

Some Hints on Folding Origami Tessellations

To fold the Origami Tessellation crease patterns that Tess produces successfully I
suggest the following method:

1. Photocopy the pattern onto a transparent or thin paper. I use tracing paper
(UK) / vellum (US) of about 70gsm.
2. Fold the pattern on a flat surface.
3. Fold ALL the thin lines as valley folds. Then turn the paper over and fold ALL
the thick lines as valley folds (These thick lines might be visible through non-
transparent paper).
4. Gently include all the creases you have made, this makes parts of the model
twist.
5. Be patient.
6. Flatten the model completely and hold up to the light to see the final pattern.

Also you should not be too ambitious. Start out by folding just small parts of the
tessellations, use the scale parameter to expand a region and only fold that. Or use the
simple twist geometry to produce just a single tile of an origami tessellation. Then
when you have gained confidence and skill you can move onto harder tessellations.

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Finally …

Best of luck with making your own Origami Tessellations! I provide this software
completely free of charge. However, I also don’t provide any support for this package
at all. If you have trouble with installing the software I can only suggest that you ask
a friend who knows about these things. If you have any constructive suggestions for
improvements to Tess, or you find any serious bugs, or feel you could contribute to
the codebase then please contact me via e-mail at [email protected].