Mohalia Madness

Back in December I made my first rendition of Ancella Simoe’s Mohalia, a modular origami model she created. Before I even finished it I knew I wanted to try creating some of my own papers to take full advantage of the design.

Ancella mentions in her blog post that the dahlia was her inspiration for the design, so I started with a Google image search. As usual this led from one place to another, to another, and several hours later, when I finally managed to drag myself out of the web I had collected some very inspiring images to work from.

Eventually I got around to creating a couple patterns, testing and refining them. If I do say so myself they turned out extremely well, and everyone I’ve shown them to agrees.

Custom Mohalia Papers

Between folding and assembling my first four or five “flowers”, I had worked up a couple more patterns. However, I had also learned that it takes a couple hours to build the things. I didn’t particularly want to waste time and money printing and folding patterns that I may not really like in the end. So, I fired up my favourite 3D program (Metasequoia) and created a 3D model of a finished Mohalia flower. Now I can test my patterns by applying them to the model as a texture. To test and refine the model I applied my first couple patterns and compared to the actual finished product. As you can see from the images below it works pretty darn well (click the image for a larger view). While not perfect, the textured 3D model gives an excellent preview of what the finished product will look like.

Moonfire Render compared to actual build

Johns Dahlia render compared to actual build

Below are some previews of other patterns I’ve created. When I get around to making the actual flowers I’ll post pictures of the finished items. In a future post I’ll show some of the images I used for inspiration, what the pattern piece looks like, and talk a bit about the process I used.

Enjoy!