Origami A Day 12: Return With Robots!

So the past couple of days, I've been rummaging around my boxes from Japan, looking for various odds and ends. I found some gifts I've been holding onto, some more Nyanpire stuff, and my Taiko No Tatsujin drums. One of my other big finds was my Orirobo book, which is hands down my favorite origami book ever.

Today, I folded Orirobo 117 from an orange piece of 6 7/8 inch Fold'ems paper. The book is filled with various robots, their enemies (called Shreds), and equipment like shields, swords, and jetpacks. It also has bios and stats for some of the robots and a timeline of the Orirobo universe. Orirobo 117 is supposed to be a speed type robot from the year 2225. It's a cool extra detail to the book that gives the robots a bit of personality.

The diagrams in this book are how I wish all books were done, with clear illustrations and written instructions for each step as well as the occasional photo for the more difficult manipulations. My only problem is the way earlier steps of the more difficult robots are taken from other pages. Since most of the robots are based around the same bases, this makes a certain kind of sense, but it can occasionally be confusing. It took somewhere between two and two and a half hours to fold.

One thing I like about the Orirobo designs is that they look good even with some serious errors. I had a very difficult time with the folds near the hips of this model, but it still looks awesome. All the extra creases and folds could just be looked at as battle damage.

This model has some sort of protrusion from his elbow. According to his profile, these are "arm cutters". I can imagine this thing whizzing around a battlefield tearing things up with its blades.

Here's a view of the back of the model. Ideally, the folds running along its spine would be uniform and straight. Still, it doesn't affect the overall look too much, though it does displace one of the arms a bit.

Here he is next to my Orirobo 115. He is the precursor to 117. Clearly there are quite a few differences. 117 looks pretty beefy for a speed robot. I should try to find some more duel colored paper for these things.

Here's a fun size comparison. These were folded from completely different paper but seem to scale well. It's a pain to get these things to stand by the way. I finally got 117 stable but had no luck getting 115 to take a pose that didn't collapse at the slightest touch.

I really can't recommend this book enough if you're a moderate to advanced folder. It's got a lot of cool extra details and the models are fun to build and to play with. I'll probably be folding a few more in the coming days.