Crease patterns deserve better than a dead link
I have spent more time looking for crease patterns than folding them. Not because there are none. Because they are everywhere, and nowhere in particular.
The pattern you want is a JPEG on a blog that has not been updated in nine years. It is an attachment on a forum thread where the host went under and left a row of broken image icons behind. It is a photograph of a laptop screen. It is in someone’s Google Drive, shared with a link that a friend of a friend once had. It is on a Flickr account that is now private, or gone, and the only trace left is a three-hundred pixel thumbnail in a search result.
When you do find one, it is a picture. So you print it, and it is the wrong scale, and the grid does not land on anything. You squint at a line that is either dark red or dark blue and decide, from the way the rest of the pattern behaves, that it must be a mountain. You count divisions off a blurry edge. You have no way to check whether what you are looking at even folds flat until you have folded it, which is the expensive way to find out that a scan lost a crease.
None of this is anyone’s fault. Designers put their work out on whatever was easy at the time, and what was easy at the time keeps shutting down. The formats that do carry real geometry, FOLD and .cp and ORIPA files, mostly sit in folders next to the programs that made them. There is no shortage of good work. There is just no shelf to keep it on.
The strange part is that a crease pattern is not really a picture at all. It is a set of line segments, each with an assignment, on a square. That is a small amount of structured data. You can validate it, search it, scale it, fold it in a simulator, and convert it between every format anyone uses, and none of that is possible once it has been flattened into pixels.
What this is for
Kamibase is an attempt at the shelf. One place where crease patterns live as geometry rather than as screenshots, where every pattern has a stable address, where you can search by what a pattern is rather than by what someone happened to title the image, and where a download gives you a file your software can open instead of something to print and squint at.
It is early, and it is small. The library is seeded with traditional bases and published mathematical patterns while the rest is built. But that is the goal, and it is the only goal: a centralized database of origami crease patterns, so that the next person looking for one spends their time folding.