Defining Bottom

Let’s keep using the dieline we made in the last tutorial, just set both crease lines angles back to 90º:

Reload it in Origami to make sure it looks like this:

If everything looks pretty much the same on your side, let’s start.

Bottom Anchor

In order to select a proper part of the dieline as a bottom plane, Origami needs your help. If you make a path named “Bottom” somewhere in the dieline, Origami will use the part with that path as the bottom element of the shape.

Those elements or markers are called “anchors” in Origami.

Make sure you put the anchor into the Origami layer and name it exactly “Bottom” (case doesn’t matter). Origami will not treat it as the part of the dieline, so the line style and shape don’t really matter. What matters is the center of the anchor element which is used to select the bottom part.

Let’s add the anchor to the middle panel:

The anchor element has no stroke at all and is of a pink color, but it doesn’t really matter to Origami, it just reads its name. Let’s reload the shape in Origami:

As you see the middle part of the shape is now on the floor, while both side parts point up. Try placing the anchor to side panels and see what is changed in Origami.

More Anchors?

Origami supports three more anchors: “Front”, “Back” and “Top”. They work the same way, yet define the front, back and top panels correspondingly.

Since folding engine V4 Origami only supports one anchor per dieline. Older folding engines support multiple anchors to properly position the shape. See below for details.

Advanced Anchors

Since folding engine V4 Origami positions the folded shape against axes X and Y exactly as the dieline is positioned against the same axes in 2D. Origami finds out the starting panel (by using the anchor or using the biggest one if no anchor is provided) and folds the shape from there without rotating it. This means you get the 3D bottom panel aligned exactly as you have it in 2D.

It might be enough in some cases, but sometimes you might want to rotate the shape, so its other side looks into the camera by default. In older folding engines you could add more anchors to position the shape, but since folding engine V4 you have only one anchor per dieline, so how do you position the shape then?

The answer is: by using the anchor rotation parameters. Basically, you can now specify additional rotation to the shape after applying the anchor. Let’s switch to the dieline editor for the shape we use and select the bottom anchor:

After clicking the anchor you will see its parameters on the left. The text field there lets you enter the rotation flags to rotate the shape. Switch back to the 3D mode really quick to see how the shape is positioned, then switch to the dieline editor again and put "rz 90" into the anchor’s parameters field:

Then switch to 3D mode and see the difference:

Let’s go further and put "rz 90 ry 90" there:

As you might guess, this should put the shape on its side. Let’s check:

Correct! The shape is now on its side, controlled by a single anchor. This way you have much more flexibility on rotating shapes (especially the tricky ones) compared to the multi-anchor approach used earlier.

Anchor Parameters Format

To summarize the above, the anchor parameters format is:

rx <Angle1> ry <Angle2> rz <Angle3>

Where each pair controls the rotation of the shape around the corresponding axis. Basically “rx” means “rotate around X” and so on. You can specify all the axes or just the ones you need. You can specify the same axis multiple times, you can put rotations around the axes in any order and Origami will do the rotations exactly in the order you specify. This basically lets you implement any rotation you need starting from any of the available anchors.

Here are some examples of the correct anchor parameters lines:

rx 90
rz -90 rz 45
rx 10 ry 20 rx 15 rz -25

All the above are correct anchor parameters configuring specific rotations. They work best in top- and bottom-less octagonal shapes where you cannot apply standard “bottom” or “front” anchors, as there’s nothing aligned to any of the standard planes.

Illustrator Support

Anchor parameters are fully supported by the Illustrator plugin and can be also exported to and imported from other graphics editors using the SVG format.

Let’s send the dieline to Illustrator and see what happens:

Note that the bottom marker element got a new name which now includes all the anchor parameters you specified. Yes, it is that simple. All you need is to start the element name with “bottom” and then append the same “rx 90 rz 45” commands there to rotate the shape.

Here are some examples of the names you can use:

Bottom rz 90
bottom rx 90 rz 45
top ry 90

Origami will look for paths with names starting with standard anchors’ names. Once found, it will check if the name contains more on the right and will use that as the anchor’s parameters, if found.

No Anchors?

If no anchors is specified the folding engine V4 will choose the biggest element of the dieline and use it as the top element of the shape. This is done to position the simple flat cut-outs in a predictable manner. We recommend to always provide an anchor to avoid unpredictable results.

The folding engines before V4 used the biggest triangle of the generated mesh as the bottom point which was pretty random as it depended on the triangulation details. Consider also providing anchors if you have to use the old folding engine.

Older Folding Engines

Old folding engines (V1, V2 and V3) supported multiple anchors per dieline. You were able to specify, say bottom and front anchors and Origami aligned the shape so each of the anchors pointed to the proper direction.

That worked well for simple “square” boxes, but failed for something like a hexagonal box without bottom, so there were nowhere to place the anchor. At the end of the day the multiple anchor approach was replaced with anchor parameters in V4 and since then multiple anchors are treated as error and only one anchor is being used.

What’s Next?

Now as you finished with anchors, it is time to try adding multiple shapes to the scene. Click the link below to start.

• Multiple Shapes — how to have several objects in the same scene;
• Dieline Generator — make dielines faster with the online generator;
• Export and Rendering — learn to export scenes or render them.

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