Folding Engines

Since version 3.2 Origami supports selection of folding engine used for a specific dieline. We recommend to always use the latest folding engine when possible, but for some reasons you might want to use a different one. Here we discuss the differences and features of all the supported engines.

Here is the folding engine selector at the bottom of the dieline properties panel:

The default (latest) folding engine at the moment is V3. Projects created in old versions of Origami use engine V2 unless manually switched to the latest one.

Engine V1

This is the first folding engine we used in Origami 1 and Origami 2. It is quite tolerant to misaligned dieline elements and tries to fix everything by itself. Sometimes it works, but in many cases it ends up with weird triangulation errors.

The main reason is that if the points are misaligned Origami has to join them somewhere and this might have consequences. Here is an element of one of our test dielines:

If you zoom it out well enough, it looks like a proper join and the author expects it to be folded straight away. Origami has to merge these points into one, but where to place that merged point? Should it use one of the existing points or just make a new one in the middle? What if it moves the crease line a bit and distort the whole shape?

Here is another example from our collection:

Again, this is a very zoomed version of two crease lines which looks perfectly fine when zoomed out. Unfortunately, there is no good solution here at all. Moving any of the vertices will make a broken crease line and fail the shape at the triangulation or folding stages.

We had a lot of weird reports for V1 engine regarding triangulation. It sometimes took hours to trace down the problem and suggest the fix. This was caused by the lack of the proper dieline diagnostic in the engine and the engine itself being too flexible.

Engine V2

The next version of folding engine was released in Origami 3.1 and was focused on providing as much dieline diagnostic information as possible. We toughen up the dieline requirements and started reporting almost all the misaligned points, except for a very small ones.

This obviously ended up with users getting reports for the dielines folded perfectly with V1 engine. According to our tests almost all the reports were correct and fixing the issues really improved the dielines quality.

In version 2 we also added the level of details parameter, so you can adjust the quality of the curves in 3D models.

Unfortunately some issues like the one below required us to make the engine even more strict, which affected existing shapes too much.

So we ended up with releasing a new folding engine.

Engine V3

The latest and the most strict engine at the moment. It does enormous job to test for misaligned elements, small gaps and duplicated points. On top of that it folds complex shapes much faster than V2 and V1 if it uses the same level of details (it usually has it much lower).

Finally

Once again we recommend using the latest V3 engine by default and roll back to V2 or V1 only for backward compatibility reasons.

We do not accept reports about folding issues with V1 or V2, so if something doesn’t work, consider switching to V3 and fixing the problems it reports. Once fixed, everything should fold well by itself.

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