Lighting maps rendered by sitting in my windowsill.

A year ago I folded these origami pyramids out of colorful squares. There were originally 13 – the steps covered all the possible resolutions of the design that I could manage within this square. Then they sat in my windowsill that year until yesterday when I was deep cleaning my space and saw how sun-bleached they were. I unwrapped one of them, and another, seeing how the articulation of folds projected these patterns onto the unfolded sheet.

With my mind in 3D graphics and virtual rendering, it was trippy to see a physical artifact that emulated baked lighting maps – prerendering an image texture to use in place of calculating real-time light and shadow. A piece of paper’s crease history is always stored immediately in the material, but only at the points of crease. Now another history, the chemical reaction of pigment across the surface recording where light could flood it.

Apparently 2 dropped out along the way – 11 maps finished rendering.

These squares came from the 2007 Kirigami Calendar. A great collection of colorful squares, which we can now see how each of these colors holds up.

Each day is printed with a fold and cut snowflake sort of design, all sorts of themes, and images of the finished version from the previous day. Some with additional 3D popup-etry. It made for a killer volume of craft kit growing up. Also an intro to idea of being presented with a regularly scheduled thing and then having a bunch to binge through when you eventually lose interest for a while. And then ultimately picking through all of them to find the good ones.

There were 6 base-folds, also I think covering this range from 2 to 7or8 radial subsections. The pages left now are mostly the boring ones, or ones with super small or inner details you needed an x-acto knife for.

Random example of a virtually baked lighting map I found from this extensive Blender tutorial article by Jim Conrad: