Nine-tailed fox
Here’s another interesting subject with many limbs; tails, in this case. It’s a creature out of Japanese folklore – the kyÅ«bi no kitsune, a fox-spirit with nine tails. It’s not unknown in origami – there’s already a design by Mithrandir, one by Guspath Go, and another one by Kim Young-won.
So it’s an interesting challenge to come up with a model using a different approach – for mine, the goal I set was a non-box pleated design, focusing more on the tails rather than detailed claws on the legs. One thing I had in mind was to get colour-changes on the tips of the tails, so this restricts the placement of the tail flaps to the sides of the square:
Packing in the tails
The radius of each tail circle is a sixth of the side of the square. This still leaves quite a bit of room to put in the head and the body. For the head, it’s just the simple and frequently-used frog base sub-CP. For the rear body, the natural place to put the legs would be right adjacent to the tail circles. Once these two (head and rear body) were positioned, the forelegs (separated from the rear by a small river) fell into place naturally. Now, this packing results in two additional circles – one next to the jaws and another touching the legs and tails. Rather than fold these away, they’re turned into flaps for the mane (ruff?):
Full circle packing
Using 90-45-22.5 degree creases, the circle packed pattern can be filled up:
Full CP utilising 22.5 degree folds
Or, if you so wish, the tails and rear body can be folded with box pleats instead:
Alternate CP with box pleats
I didn’t have a nice dual-coloured paper, so the final model doesn’t quite reflect the colour change at the tip of the tail:
Side view of finished model
Front view of finished model
Adding claws for this is a fairly simple affair. Notice that the circles for the fore and rear legs lie along the same vertical/horizontal lines. This means that by just adding one pair of strip grafts going through these circles, claws for all four limbs can be made simultaneously.
September 26th, 2006 at 8:01 am
nice!this is the 1st time i see you design using circle packing!
is the cp drawn using CadSTD?
September 26th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Nice. It looks like someone grabbed its snout and yanked it out a few feet….:)
September 26th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
Steven: Same CadSTD as always. Actually, the original design was done using square packing, with just a small circle packed region for the head and front body. For consistency though, the CP was then redrawn using circles. Otherwise, they’re mostly equivalent.
Aznman: Yep, the larger head is intentional; it’s an attempt to make it look less realistic and more like the foxes in console games.
October 21st, 2006 at 6:47 am
Ninetailed Fox is a monster in Chinese ancient book ‘San Hae Kyung’ So, falklore of Ninetailed Fox has tranmited by China, Korea, Japan…
Japan’s Ninetailed fox is dealed by evil.
China’s Ninetailed Fox is dealed by inteligence monster(1000 year’s fox change the Ninetailed Fox.)
In ‘San Hae Kyung’, Ninedtailed Fox appeared ancient Korea. then, Originally Ninetailed Fox is divined god of anceient Korea which help people.
but, this thing is distoted by Japan
so, monster Ninetailed fox has appeared In Korea’s falklore
November 28th, 2006 at 10:52 am
i like to much the nine tail fox
July 16th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
lol… your graphics hurt my eyes.
September 21st, 2007 at 5:50 am
The Kyuubi is a demon from the far east folklores and a demon from the famuous anime Naruto! Very nice Origami!
April 7th, 2008 at 6:38 am
u suke balls
April 7th, 2008 at 6:39 am
you rock !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!NOT
April 22nd, 2008 at 3:19 pm
how do u use cp paper, im not new to origami but i never used it so, help plz!!!!!!!!!!!
April 23rd, 2008 at 9:56 pm
CP stands for crease patterns, it is not a type of paper. If you are new to CPs, take a look at Robert Lang’s page on CPs, and then attempt a few on your own.