Once I got up to speed on it, I have found that I particularly enjoy using Illustrator for doing CP and related things. Mind you, I'm pretty much a geometric-tessellation-etc kind of guy, so it's not like I'm trying to illustrate collapsing a wet-folded curve or something.
however, I find Illustrator's "Smart Guides" to be amazingly useful- I can set angles, and lines will just snap to those angles when I draw them; they automatically snap to other lines, etc, so drawing a grid or complex CP for a tessellation becomes extremely easy to do (once, of course, you unfold your work and figure out where all the creases actually are!)
there's also a very nice tool in development called ORIPA - it's only in japanese, and runs as a java applet (it's a packed .jar file). it's very rough around the edges, and requires some fiddling to get working- and, of course, it's only in japanese- but it's quite easy to use. once you lay out a crease pattern, you can hit a button and it will fold it and show you how that would look as a fold. it's impressive and it looks like things are really developing well on the project. I haven't done a writeup on it yet, but I'm planning to once I play some more and take some better screen shots.
you can download the ORIPA program from
here.it requires the Java JRE 1.5.0 (linked there) and potentially also the Java3D thing (also linked there). once you have those, you can just right-click on the .jar file and "save as". then you can just doubleclick on it and it will run.
there's also a Wiki there with many existing examples (the traditional crane, various bases, etc) which you can download and try.
the program has it's own format, but exports to .dxf (a standard CAD/CAM format) which can be opened in things like illustrator, CorelDraw, and others.
that's my 2 cents! I'm cross-posting this to the CP thread as well, just to be obnoxious.
big thanks to Komatsu Hideo, for linking to this program on his
blog, "fold/unfold". he has some great examples of what he's been doing with it, and I'm really glad he turned me on to this neat program.