Circle packing...

[Nepfreak]

After reading through lang's Origami Design Secrets, I know how circle packing works, but I don't really know how to apply the knowledge in real life. How would I go about packing a bunch of circles into a square? With boxpleats you can simply draw smaller squares in a bigger square -- a feat accomplishable with graph paper and a pencil -- but circle packing poses other difficulties.
Dr. Lang suggests a jig made from cardboard, but this seems cumbersome and somehow I don't envision everybody taking out their jig, cutting out circles, and fiddling with them until they fit for every new model. Plus, you have pretty much no control over where the circles are going to end up. It would be better if there was some program that allows you to "jig" the circles around virtually. I've tried oripa, but I just can't get it to run, even after reading through most of the giant oripa thread. I think my computer hates jar files.
Does anyone know of a method or program that would allow me to play around with squares and circles? What do you guys do when you sit down to design a circle-packed model?
Thanks,
Ben

[Jonnycakes]

You can use Treemaker (available here on Lang's site) to simulate circle packing. It works, but it doesn't typically return "usable" bases. Circle packing is mainly used as a design aid rather than a full-fledged design technique. What most people do is use graph paper and approximate the locations of circles and rivers by hand, mainly to decide paper allocation and flap arrangement. From there other design techniques such as tiling, box-pleating, and polygon packing (a generalized form of box-pleating that uses any shape for a flap instead of a square) to fill in the creases and, most likely, shift around (slightly) the arrangement of circles and rivers.

[kehom]

I'm no expert on this subject and actually, I failed all the time to circle pack.
Well, now I'm reading the entire book for the second time and it's really nice that I'm understanding things a lot better now.
The thing is, I just designed a model using circle packing (the picture is on the January challenge).
How I did it?! Well, funny, I just drew a circle in Inkscape, marking the very center of it with an small circle then grouped it. Once I had that, I made copies of it (ctrl+c, ctr+v is really powerful there!) until I had the right amount. Once I got that, I tried to distribute in a way I thought to be good. After that, I drew the square!
Probably there are better ways, but, it worked for me!

[orislater]

how do you design the box pleat?
i drew squares but now what do i do?

[oyster]

robert's "origami design secret" says something about box-pleat. But I think this chapter is more rough than the previous circle-river-pack chapters. But that may be because of my stupid head

Moreover, as the title says, "origami design secret" only tells how to design, there is still a long way to go even if you have devised a CP.

there are also some blog with box-pleat articles, e.g http://spinflipper.com/blog/. You can find some useful information

[mrguy]

first of all you need to make the ridge creases which can be made by using a strait skeleton design within your shape.

but since your only using squares then just basically make an X from all the corners if you know what I mean. then if you would like to thin the flaps then add whats called contour lines that run horisontaly and verticly or what ever Axis you are using. the lines run and then bounce through the ridges like mirrors. start from the middle of a shape and go until it hits itself or runs off the edge of the paper.the next line should be right next to it on either side however far you want it thick. make the lines untill the space is filled. I realize this may be confusing but if you understand this great. if not I suggest geting the book Origami design secrets. he talks about quite alot of topics and to be honest I didn't read most of the complex stuff. but good luck