The Origami Forum

Hi there,
I have designed a complex water strider using treemaker. I printed out the crease pattern, measured all the reference points, but I don't know how to convert those references to a larger sheet. So for example, lets say I measured the reference points on a 25 cm sheet, and one of the references was 0.22. How would I convert that point to measure it on a 45 cm square sheet? I apologize if I didn't explain things clearly enough.
-Justin

I've actually been meaning to make a tutorial for doing this for a while now.
Scale ratio.
Pretty much, if the crease pattern was 25x25, and the square was 45x45, you would do one of the following:
1. measure to the desired point on the crease pattern
2. set up a proportion, like this: (imagine the point was located on the edge of the paper) p is the point on the crease pattern, and x will be the location of that point on the full size paper. to solve this, cross multiply - lets say p = 15:
25x = 675
you want to isolate the x variable, so divide each side by 25. Which gives you:
x=27
You can, of course, do the same for the diagonal. Just substitute 25 and 45 (edge length) for diagonal length of the respective squares. Always make sure "x" is above the larger square's edge length!

There is a quicker way, which I actually prefer.

1. divide the length of the larger square in into the smaller square (45/25). this is your scale ratio.
2. multiply that number, which is 1.8 in this case, by the location of the desired point on the CP.
1.8 x 15 = 27
3. repeat for every other point,
as with the first one, you can do it with diagonals also - just divide the diagonal length of the larger square into the smaller square and do the same thing.

hope this helps!

I think this helped! Thanks

Another way of doing it is by finding the highest common factor of the two sheet sizes (for this it's 5). Divide 0.22 by 5 and times by 9 to get back up to 45. This is pretty much percentage increase.

EDIT: I got my hands on a calculator and worked it out.

0.22/5 = 0.044
0.044 x 9 = 0.396

I hope this is right but if not I'm sorry.