Pop-up cards and books

Ingenious pop-up images bring graphics to life and always introduce an element of surprise. A successful pop-up design is the result of the image, message and mechanism all working together effectively. Answering the following questions will help you get the balance right. Who is it for? Many pop-up cards and books are aimed at the younger age group, but a pop-up can provide an exciting way to convey information to adults. You must be clear about the type of person you are designing for. An understanding of things they find appealing or amusing will help you decide on a style and theme for your design. PCMRT 1 Downloaded from  – the website of Nuffield Secondary Design & Technology Pop-ups Design Guide What will it look like? Certain images have become clichéd and over-used. For example, an obvious idea for a Christmas card would feature a robin or Christmas tree. To help you devise an imaginative and original pop-up, it is important to research the theme and use brainstorming exercises to discover a richer source of images. Give careful thought too the style of decoration of your design and the effect that you want to create.

PAQL136 - Fall in love

Detail

 A pop-up storybook could use bright colours and an amusing cartoon style to encourage a child to learn to read, whereas a get well card for an elderly person would require a more gentle, cheerful style. Remember that too much decoration may distract from the three-dimensional image. A pop-up can look impressive left quite plain. You will need to consider the appearance of the message or text. The style of the lettering and the layout of the words should be attractive, but also suit the image of the pop-up design. How will it work? Pop-ups use a variety of different mechanisms. Some are very complicated, but even the most basic can have a lot of visual impact. It is useful to study popup books and cards and analyse how they are constructed. You can adapt a mechanism for your own design. You will find instructions for pop-up mechanisms opposite. P

Follow these simple steps to learn the basic shapes for quilling…

Follow these simple steps to learn the basic shapes for quilling… then combine them to create fun pop-up cards designs of your own! 1. Cut the ends off your Q-tip and use it to roll one of your paper strips into a tight coil. (I find that rolling towards me is easiest, but that’s just personal preference.) 2. Apply a small amount of glue to the end and press it down for a few seconds. 3. Now pull out your Q-tip “quill” — you have just completed your first tight coil. 4. Roll another coil the same way, but when you get to the end, pull out your quill and release your grip just a little so your coil begins to expand. You can let it expand a lot or just a little—it’s up to you. A small amount of glue will hold it in place at the size you want. We’ll call this a loose coil.

 5. Now make two more loose coils. Pinch one of them on one side to form a teardrop shape. Pinch the other one on two opposing sides to form an eye shape. 6. To make a graceful “S” curve, roll a strip halfway and release it. Then roll the other end of the strip halfway in the opposite direction and release again. 7. A heart shape is made by first folding your paper strip in half. Then roll each end in toward the middle, releasing when you get to the size you want your heart shape to be. 8. After making each of these basic shapes, it’s easy to make triangles, squares, and more. 9. Finally, use small amounts of glue to assemble your shapes into all kinds of fun designs. Make strips fast with a paper shredder Cut ends of Q-tip to roll strips Apply glue to end of strip with a toothpick Tight coil Loose coil Open coil Teardrop shape Eye shape S curve Heart shape Triangle shape Square shape Quilled Butterfly Quilled Crab Quilled Octopus Quilled Sea Star Quilling Cards Octopus Quilled Fish Building a complicated design with quilling can take some patience! It’s a good idea to start with a small project like a greeting card, which will help students learn new skills and experience success without feeling frustrated by a project that takes too long to complete.

How to make your Valentine Card:

Take one of the sheets of card and fold it in half widthways. This is the base of the cards pop-up. Place it aside for later. 2. Now take one of the sheets of paper and carefully cut 2 strips from it lengthways, about 3-5mm wide. 3. Begin winding one of the strips around the handle of a thin paintbrush or knitting needle. When you reach the end, let the coil loosen slightly. Put a dab of glue on the end of the paper strip and stick it down onto the coil to fasten. 4. Take the second strip and snip off about 1/3 of its length. Put the shorter offcut piece aside. Taking the longer strip of paper, repeat step 3. 5. Now repeat step 4 using the piece that you cut away from the second strip. You should be left with 3 paper coils, large medium and small. Allow the glue to dry. 6.

Now make your quilled hearts: Pick up the large coil and, using your thumb and forefinger, pinch one side of it into a point as shown in the diagram (A). 7. Next, gently push the other side of the coil into an ‘M’ shape as shown in the diagram (B). Repeat this process with the other 2 coils. 8. Take the sheet of coloured paper and cut out a rectangle about 10 x 6cm. Punch 2 holes in the top of the card as shown in the diagram (C) 9. Take the remaining sheet of Quilling card and cut out a rectangle about 5 x 9cm. Punch 2 holes in the top of the card as shown in the diagram (C). You will need: 2 x sheets of A4 coloured card (eg. cat nos. 817779 Deep Violet) 1 x sheet of A4 coloured paper (eg. cat no. 819310 Rose) Glue (eg. cat no. 701702) Thin coloured ribbon or thread approximately 15cm in length (eg. cat no. 209807) Single hole punch (although an ordinary hole punch can be used) Rectangle of white paper approximately 8 x 12cm or a metallic pen (eg. cat no. 822185) Thin paintbrush or knitting needle © Copyright Hampshire County Council 2008 Pinch here Press in here A B C 10. Apply glue to the underside of your quilled hearts and stick them onto the rectangle of coloured card that you have just cut out. Arrange the hearts so that they are in a stack with the largest heart at the bottom and the smallest at the top. Allow the glue to dry. Continues... QUilling Valentine Card How to make a... 3 11. Place the card with your quilled hearts design on top of the rectangle of paper. Thread ribbon through both sets of holes and tie in a bow at the front. 12. Apply glue to the underside of the paper and attach it to the base of your card. Allow to dry. 13. To make the inside greeting of your card either: a) Stick a rectangle of white paper inside the card and write your message on the paper or... b) Write your message in silver metallic pen. 14. Put your card into a suitable envelope and it’s ready to send to your secret admire-ee! For further advice on completing this project please contact Helen White in the Marketing and Information Team on helen.white@hants.gov.uk Variations: Different effects can be obtained by using a variety of paper colours and varying the tightness of the coils. Try also adding coils that have been bent into a different shape such as a leaf shape, square, oval or teardrop. Once you’ve got the hang of quilling, why not try making other scenes. Anything is possible. Be as simple or as complicated as you like. Quilling is ideal for making pictures, cards, gift tags and much more at any time of year

Here we proposed an assistant interface to help people to design and create popup cards

Here we proposed an assistant interface to help people to design and create popup cards. Our system examines whether the parts protrude from the card or whether they collide with one another during interactive editing, and it displays the result continuously to the user as feedback. This helps the user concentrate on the design activity. We showed sample pop-up cards created using our system and reported the results of a preliminary user study. The preliminary user study shows that the protrusion and collision detection functions are very effective.
We plan to add new functions to the system in the future. First, we would like to make a mirror editing system in which the system changes values to maintain symmetry if the user edits a part. Second, we would like to create a function that the user could use to change lengths and angles by entering numerical values. Third, we would like to make a constraint mechanism so that when the user marks a pair of edges, those two edges are always the same length.

Whereas we use textures to add appearance details to a part, preparing the texture in advance using other software is inconvenient. We would like to let the user paint textures directly on a part using our system. Although we have implemented five mechanisms in this system, there are many other possibilities. One of the most interesting mechanisms we plan to implement is curved surfaces. Curved surfaces deform non-linearly unlike a simple planar surfaces and we plan to apply some soft of physical simulation. We would not claim that our method (direct manipulation interface with continuous feedback) is the best interface for designing physical objects in gen- eral. There are many other methods for designing physical objects such as quick sketching or tangible interfaces. Each method has its own strength and weakness. Our experience is that sketching and tangible approaches are less constraining, so they are good for very early exploration. In contrast, our method is suitable for later stages of design process or for the design of objects with complicated constraits. Pop-up card is an example of highly-constrained objects where one can not design arbitrary shape and our approach works well. However, it is true that our method is a little bit too constraining for very initial exploration and we would like to work on this problem in the future. Acknowledgements We would like to thank Jun Mitani for his helpful comments. We also appreciate the members of Igarashi Laboratory for their useful discussions.

8 shows examples of pop-up cards designed using our system

Fig. 8 shows examples of pop-up cards designed using our system. The first was based on “The Wonderful Wizard of OZ” [2] pop-up book shown in Fig. 8 (a). We designed the piece shown in Fig. 8 (b) on our system in approximately C D E F G H I J Fig. 8. Pop-up cards designed using our system. 2h. Determining the heights and position was easy due to the error detection mechanism. Fig. 8 (d)-(f) show the templates generated by our system, which required approximately 2h for assembly in the final form shown in Fig. 8 (c). Fig. 8 (g) shows another example. This required approximately 2h for the design and 2.5 h for assembly into the final form shown in Fig. 8 (h). These results show that our system can handle reasonably complicated pop-up structures. We also conducted an informal preliminary user study. The test was conducted using a typical notebook personal computer with a keyboard and a mouse. We assigned two tasks: create a pop-up card of a building without using our system (Task 1) and perform the same task using our system (Task 2). Two test users participated in the study. They first completed Task 1. We then explained our system to them and had them practice with it for approximately 5 min before attempting Task 2. After they had finished both tasks, we conducted a brief interview to receive their feedback. &_' &`' &a' EQNNKUKQP &b' &c' Fig. 9. User study results. (a) The card produced by the first user in Task 1. (b) Collision occurs when the object in (a) is closed. (c) The card produced by the first user in Task 2. (d) The card produced by the second user in Task 1. (e) The card produced by the second user in Task 2. The first test user had never created pop-up cards before and had no knowledge of them. Fig. 9 (a) shows the card created by the first user in Task 1. It looks good, but it is difficult to close because of the collision shown in Fig. 9 (b). Fig. 9 (c) shows the card created by the first user in Task 2; it is simple but it closes correctly. The first user required 30 min to complete Task 1 (15 min for design and 15 min for construction) but only 20 min to complete Task 2 (10 min each for design and construction).

During interactive editing, the system examines whether the parts protrude from the card

During interactive editing, the system examines whether the parts protrude from the card when closed or whether they collide with one another during closing and opening. When the system detects such a protrusion or collision, it displays a message on the lower right portion of the window and highlights the parts that caused the error as shown in Figs. 7 (c) and (d). This occurs in real time. The message and the highlights disappear immediately once the error is resolved. &_' &`' FTCI &d' &f' &e' &g' FTCI FTCI &a' &h' &i' UJKHVMG[ FTCI FTCI &c' &b' Fig. 6. User interface to edit shapes. The user can (a)-(e) change lengths; (f), (g) change open angles; (h), (i) change gradient angles; and (j), (k) apply textures. 4 Implementation We implemented our prototype system based on Glassner’s work [4] [5] [6] using Microsoft Visual C++ with the MFC platform.

We also used OpenGL to render the scene and OpenCV to read images. Fig. 3 shows the functions that were implemented. Note that the Undo function has not yet been implemented. A pop-up card is represented as a tree data structure. Each node of the tree corresponds to a part and contains its relative position on the parent part and various parameters. The system first computes the card position based on its open angle and updates its center fold line information. It next updates the 3D coordinates of the parts on the fold line. The system repeats this procedure recursively to determine the 3D coordinates of all parts. OQXG OQXG ENQUG ENQUG JKIJNKIJV YCTPKPI YCTPKPI JKIJNKIJV C D E F G H Fig. 7. User interface when the system detects errors. (a), (b) The user moves a part. (c), (d) The system displays a warning message and highlights the part if the system detects an error. (e) The part protrudes from the card if the card is closed. (f) The part collides with one another if the card is closed. The system checks for protrusion and collision errors while dragging and placing parts. The system checks for collisions at every 10◦ . This may miss a minor collision, but this is not an issue due to the inherent flexibility of paper. We initially tried checking every 1◦ , but this was too slow when the number of parts increased.

shows a screenshot of our prototype system

Fig. 2 shows a screenshot of our prototype system. Our system allows the user to design pop-up cards using a mouse and a keyboard. The system consists of a single window for the design and simulation of the pop-up card. Fig. 3 shows the system functions. The user positions parts, adjusts their properties (e.g., length, angle, position and pattern), and generates templates. During interactive editing, the system always examines whether parts protrude from the card or whether they collide with one another. The user can use five mechanisms in our system. The V-fold mechanism, the even-tent mechanism, and the uneven-tent mechanism were introduced by Glassner [4]. The angle fold open box mechanism and the angle fold cube mechanism [17] based on the V-fold are new. The former forms a box, which is an empty rectangular parallelepiped without a top and a bottom as shown in Fig. 4 (a). The latter makes an angle fold open box with a lid as shown in Fig. 4 (b). The lid is folded toward the inside of the box when the card is closed. Fig. 2. Prototype system. OQXG GFKV OCRVGZVWTG UKOWNCVKQP FGNGVG GTTQT EJGEM IGPGTCVG VGORNCVG IGPGTCVGRCTVU Fig. 3. Prototype system functions. &_' &`' Fig. 4. (a) Angle fold open box mechanism. (b) Angle fold cube mechanism. 3.1 Constrained Editing Setting Parts The user first selects a desired mechanism and moves the mouse cursor to a fold line where the black point then appears. If the user clicks the mouse button, the system automatically generates the new part at that position with default lengths and angles that can be adjusted later (see Fig. 5). &_' &`' ENKEM Fig. 5. User interface for setting parts. (a) When the user clicks on a fold line, (b) the system generates a new part there. Editing Shapes The user drags the vertices of a part to edit its shape as shown in Fig. 6. The vertices of a part are highlighted when the user selects that part. The user can then drag the vertices one at a time. When editing lengths, the user can maintain the parallelogram shape by pressing the Shift key while dragging as shown in Fig. 6 (c). The user can also extend a panel of a part as shown in Figs. 6 (d) and (e) or change the angle between two planes or the inclination of the part as shown in Figs. 6 (f)-(i). Deleting Parts The user clicks on a part to delete it. If other parts exist on the part being deleted, they are also deleted. Mapping Textures The user prepares images in advance and can use them as textures. To put a texture on a part, the user selects a panel of a part and an image as shown in Figs. 6 (j) and (k). Generating Templates The system automatically generates 2D templates from the 3D model designed by the user. The system also creates glue tabs and generates guidelines to tell the user where to glue them on.