The third piece for my dino trio, the stegosaurus was a model I really wanted to design. But due to the complex shape, this was put into question. I wasn’t sure if I could design a good enough model.
In terms of body structure, this dinosaur features several distinctive characteristics such as 4 spikes on the tail, 6+ pairs of slightly overlapping back plates, 4 smaller non-overlapping plates along the neck, bent front legs, and an arched back to name a few. The combination of these characteristics makes this model especially challenging to design. On top of that, an already existing stegosaurus model (the one by Kaede Nakamura) is considered one of the best and well known 22.5 designs in the origami community.
Inspired by existing stegosaurus designs, I based my model on an 8 x 8 grid with 22.5 structures. The model is symmetric along the diagonal, except for some shaping for the plates.
Unlike previous model progressions, this time I aimed to complete an end design that would not likely require much, if not any, future improvements to the shaping and structure. This required folding significantly more iterations for each body part in order to have multiple design options to choose from. This was mainly done for the head neck portion, the front leg, and the tail. This method ensured a high quality result, but demanded more folding and more time commitment.
The head took the longest and was the most difficult; not only because the neck plates had to be hidden in the neck, but also the specific shape which had to be based on 22.5 angles. I spent a significant amount of time arriving at an acceptable design only to completely change it after. The head could be thinner. I chose to leave it in its current state because I liked the 22.5 shape.
The front leg required distributing paper from the side to produce additional layers for the leg in order to maintain the tallest front leg possible using existing paper. This paper distribution posed a complicated puzzle that resulted in an interesting and slightly difficult collapsing sequence. At first I used a gridded boxpleat to achieve the basic idea. However, this was not ideal due to 22.5 rules; it would be better to figure it out using 22.5 instead. After randomly folding creases and attempting to collapse it unsuccessfully, I landed on a strange structure that worked. I drew the structure on inkscape to confirm the design.
The tail was completed on the first try without much thinking, so curiously, I decided to test different ratios and configurations. One thing I noticed in some skeletal drawings is that the end of the tail is very short for stegosaurus, much shorter than the last pair of spikes. This is different from other stegosauridae species. At the end, I concluded that the tail needed no changes.
For the back plates, there were a few different options for the shape. I decided on a symmetric spade shape with a 90 degree angle top, in contrast to Kaede’s more sharp triangular shape. The neck plates are also symmetric, in 45 degree triangles. Based on the skeletals, there should be at least 6 pairs of back plates, but I was only able to squeeze in 5.
One of the main problems I ran into was the shape of the body in proportion to the length of the legs. The legs were slightly too short relative to the bulky body. So in order to make the proportions more accurate without drastically changing the existing structure, I had to design shaping that kept the legs as long as possible. More paper was distributed to the front leg so it didn’t end in a sharp tip that needed to be folded in, and the back leg was left as long as possible, with the front faces representing the knee and different leg parts. The lower layers connecting the head and neck to the main body were sinked to maintain a straight 22.5 angle all the way to the tip of the head. They also served to thin the body and create the illusion of longer front legs.
There is very little shaping apart from the existing 22.5 structures. A crimp at the belly creates depth while maintaining the 22.5 profile.
For the paper, I used a 24.5in by 24.5in sheet of metallic paper (similar to tissue foil) that was given to me by the owner of Paper Tree in San Francisco during a convention years ago. The first time folding with this paper, I thought the metallic paper was surprisingly pleasurable to fold with, given that I generally avoid tissue foil. Unlike tissue foil, the metal backing of the metallic paper seemed to be sprayed on as a very thin layer, which doesn’t crinkle easily. This enabled the model to look especially clean.
Overall, the model is fairly well designed and relatively efficient. I could not be more satisfied with this being the third piece to my dino trio.
