I'm starting to realize that I never manage to shape right the legs in every horse model i've folded (and those were a lot: Montroll,Diaz,Trollip...).
It's not that I don't understand the diagrams, it's just that the legs dont' look good when finished.
Now I'm watching photos of real horses, trying to discover if there are "keys" for shaping (were to make the joints, angles, etc) but still nothing . I was wondering if any of you had any thoughts about this?
Horse legs
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Hi Aleburzyn.
Thats a good question.
I think the problem is probably not so much your folding, but mainly the horse designs. Horses have many joints in their legs, and everytime you make a crimp fold to depict one of those joints, you lose some of the length of the leg flap. Adding hooves then also shortens it even more. That is one of the reasons I was experimenting with adding grafts for hooves, which will eliminate the need of crimp folds to form the hooves. This then ultimately lead to the development of my Clydesdale horse, which seems to have longer legs. But the flaps are the same length as in the normal horse, just you dont do all the crimps.
I hope this makes sense.
What Im trying to say is that a horse is a very difficult subject in origami, mainly because of its long thin legs, but also because of its long neck and detailed head (which prevents the use of the four corners for the legs - as this would generally yield a short flap for the head).
So there is still a great need for a really good horse (from a square) in origami.
Dave Brills Horse legs are probably the best, but his is from a triangle.
Satoshis horse looks good, but I dont know too much about his horse structure to comment on that.
Another example is Roman Diaz new Unicorn, where he left out the detailed folds of the legs to obtain the length of the flaps - but he managed to do so in a very elegant way.
Hope that helps
Greetings
Quentin
Thats a good question.
I think the problem is probably not so much your folding, but mainly the horse designs. Horses have many joints in their legs, and everytime you make a crimp fold to depict one of those joints, you lose some of the length of the leg flap. Adding hooves then also shortens it even more. That is one of the reasons I was experimenting with adding grafts for hooves, which will eliminate the need of crimp folds to form the hooves. This then ultimately lead to the development of my Clydesdale horse, which seems to have longer legs. But the flaps are the same length as in the normal horse, just you dont do all the crimps.
I hope this makes sense.
What Im trying to say is that a horse is a very difficult subject in origami, mainly because of its long thin legs, but also because of its long neck and detailed head (which prevents the use of the four corners for the legs - as this would generally yield a short flap for the head).
So there is still a great need for a really good horse (from a square) in origami.
Dave Brills Horse legs are probably the best, but his is from a triangle.
Satoshis horse looks good, but I dont know too much about his horse structure to comment on that.
Another example is Roman Diaz new Unicorn, where he left out the detailed folds of the legs to obtain the length of the flaps - but he managed to do so in a very elegant way.
Hope that helps
Greetings
Quentin
My flickr album: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12043525@N04/