Power Word Fold

Asymmetric models always pose interesting design and folding problems.

Take sword-wielding people, for example. The stereotypical image of a fantasy fighter often involves a sword much larger than the wielder. There’s even the Monkey Grip feat in a splatbook that deals with this. Just looking at the tree figure alone, we’ll see that we’re going to need a single long flap to deal with the sword. If we were to keep the crease pattern symmetric, we’ll need its mirror image, which means another sword in the other hand. So you’ll either end up with a two weapon fighter (not so cool), or a sword-and-board guy (not cool at all).


Tree figure

So we’ll have to work with an asymmetric crease pattern. Since the sword is the main defining feature of Big Sword Guy, we’ll start with the packing pattern for that, and work our way out. Here’s the packing arrangement for the sword and swordarm:


Packing arrangement for sword and swordarm

The sword flap will be placed at one corner of the paper; it’s effectively the longest flap in the model, so for packing efficiency it’s placed in the corner. The rest of the tree figure transcription is done around it:


Square packing for entire model

The packing is still mostly symmetric, and the axis of the base (and human figure) is slightly offset from the central vertical axis of the square. This gives some unused space in the bottom right of the square. Rather than just using a filler molecule for this, we can turn this into a fairly large flap and add more detail to the model – in this case, the flap goes into making the cloak for the figure.


Partial crease pattern


Full crease pattern

This is a relatively straightforward crease pattern to collapse as there are hardly any interior flaps. A few days’ worth of folding yields the completed model:


Finished model