Clover Folding Lookalike

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This is my design which at first glance looks very similar to Shuzo Fujimoto’s Clover Folding but has a completely different crease pattern and design.

The main difference is that it lacks the three-dimensionality in the central part. While Clover Folding becomes taller with each level of stacked tiles which form a pyramid, this model remains flat regardless of size. The spacing between individual tiles is less pronounced. Like Clover Folding, this model can be made larger and larger depending on how big a grid you use. The CP and precrease are quite a bit more complex to construct than in the original, but the advantage is more effective paper use: folded from a sheet of same size, the Lookalike is much larger than original Clover Folding.

As Dirk Eisner correctly pointed out, this design is pretty much an Inverted Square Twists Tessellation, the same as Robert Lang’s Koi Fish Scales. It differs from Lang’s scales just in the spacing of molecules and arrangement of the flaps. I used the same basic idea with different modifications in many other designs as well, for example Square Pixel Tessellation, Just Stars, Double Spearhead Tessellation and Two-in-One Flower Tessellation

One way or another, I think this is an interesting exercise, even though I think the original is a more elegant model overall.

You can compare the lookalike and the original in this picture.

A few years after designing this, I learned that other had had the same idea (both before and after me), namely John McKeever whose version you can see on flickr and who mentioned also Mark Leonard and possibly others as independent discoverers.