Unfolding Orthogonal Polyhedra: Animations

This page links to several animations of algorithms for unfolding orthogonal polyhedra. All the animations are Copyright of the authors. You may use them but please let us know that you are! For a general introduction to the topic, see:

For each animation, clicking on the link should launch an external viewer, but the behavior depends on your browser, its plug-ins, and the environment.

• Unfolding Orthogonal Polyhedra
  J. O'Rourke
  Proceedings of the Snowbird Conference Discrete and Computational Geometry: Twenty Years Later, Eds. J.E. Goodman, J. Pach, R. Pollack. American Mathematical Society, to appear, 2007.

The first two animations were produced by Robin Flatland and Ray Navarette, of Siena College, as illustrative of the algorithm described in this paper:

• Unfolding Manhattan Towers
  Mirela Damian, Robin Flatland, Joseph O'Rourke
  Accepted to Computational Geometry: Theory & Applications, 2007.
  Original: 17th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, Aug. 2005, Windsor, Ontario, pp. 211-214.

1. Single box unfolding: .wmv file (Windows Media File) singlebox_4x.wmv (2MB)
2. Reverse-direction suture: .wmv file (Windows Media File) rdsuture_4x.wmv (4MB)

The next three animations were produced by Joseph O'Rourke of Smith College, and are illustrative of the algorithm in this paper:

• Unfolding Orthogonal Terrains
  Joseph O'Rourke
  Smith Technical Report 084, July 2007. arXiv:0707.0610v4 [cs.CG]

Each animation can either be displayed within the page (via the HTML <embed> tag) by double-clicking on the image, or external to the page (via an <a> tag). In general the link (<a> tag) will give better results, but much depends on your browser, its plug-ins, and the environment.

1. Random 10x10: #1
   .mov (Quicktime) ten1.mov (130KB)
2. Random 10x10: #2 .mov (Quicktime) ten2.mov (140KB)
3. Random 20x20.: #1 .mov (Quicktime) twenty1.mov (150KB)