Roberto Soto posted this email to the Origami-L mailing list:

I just found this Java based program named ORIPA. It’s a program to create
crease patterns (or to draw existing crese patterns), but the funny thing is
that it can actually show youde finished model.

I was just wandering if any of you have heard or read about it before??

the link: http://mitani.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/pukiwiki-oripa/

I had to reply to this, of course- ORIPA is a wonderful software tool, and deserves more attention from the western origami world. I was pleased to find that Jun Mitani had localized it to English, and made an English language page with instructions for how to get it working. That’s a lot of extra work for him, especially with a new baby at home, and I’m very grateful he took the time to do that.

Here’s my reply to the O-list.

I wrote a bit about this program on my site a few months ago:

https://www.origamitessellations.com/2005/12/12/figuring-out-things-with-oripa/

Jun Mitani’s program is quite an excellent one, which works out amazingly well for folding a lot of basic (and not so basic) models. There’s been a lot of traffic in the Japanese origami blog community about this particular app, with a lot of interesting pieces being produced with it.

here’s a few of them, via Technorati’s blog search:

http://www.technorati.com/search/ORIPA

also, Hideo Komatsu has been playing around with ORIPA quite a bit- his blog has a number of posts on his usage of it, especially as he tries to use it to diagram his work (it doesn’t often fold the patterns properly, and I believe he submits the bugs he finds to the author).

you can read his blog here:

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/origami

his blog posts on ORIPA:

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/origami/searchdiary?word=oripa&.submit=%B8%A1%BA%F7&type=detail (http://tinyurl.com/9gcwq, or search for yourself in the left hand search window)

you can run this through babelfish’s translation tool (not so good, though) which will lose the photos- make sure to view it in japanese first, as there’s lots of pictures.

http://tinyurl.com/arkbr (babelfish link, link text is much too long.)

However, there was a posting by Komatsu a while ago which I interpreted as saying that development on ORIPA was coming to an end. That may be completely incorrect, though, so don’t take my word on it.

Jun Mitani has localized the application for English as of version 0.16, which is a wonderful thing- you can view his english language page with instructions here:

http://mitani.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/pukiwiki-oripa/index.php?ORIPA%3B%20Origami%20Pattern%20Editor

(or http://tinyurl.com/8ezde here if that link is too long, and wraps on your screen).

since the program is now available in english, it should significantly lower the barrier for more people to play with it. The application is very interesting- you can lay out a crease pattern, and it will tell you whether or not it will fold; furthermore, it will fold it and show you the final folded model. You can flip the model and see both sides, have it spread out the layers a bit to better see the folds, turn it to wireframe mode so you can see through the layers, etc.

There is also an upload board- kind of a wiki BBS page for discussing issues, uploading files, and the like. that page is here:

http://mitani.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/oripa/upboard/upboard.cgi

All you need to make it run on windows is a reasonably recent Java install, and his program file (currently oripa016.jar). By all means download it and give it a try!

-Eric Gjerde
https://www.origamitessellations.com