and Techniques—Interaction Techniques;Computer Graphics [I.3.5]: Computational Geometry and Objec-

Figure 1: Thin-plate forms modeled by soft folding. Subfigures visualize their corresponding fold and sewing patterns. Color and thickness of a fold line indicates its fold magnitude and sharpness(see Fig. 5). Seams are shown as pairs of thick curves on the border. From left to right: Water-bomb origami pattern applied on a leather sheet, a leather penholder and shoe. We introduce soft folding, a new interactive method for designing and exploring thin-plate forms. A user specifies sharp and soft folds as two-dimensional(2D) curves on a flat sheet, along with the fold magnitude and sharpness of each. Then, based on the soft folds, the system computes the three-dimensional(3D) folded shape. Internally, the system first computes a fold field, which defines local folding operations on a flat sheet. A fold field is a gen-eralization of a discrete fold graph in origami, replacing a graph with sharp folds with a continuous field with soft folds. Next, local patches are folded independently according to the fold field. Finally, a globally folded 3D shape is obtained by assembling the locally folded patches. This algorithm computes an approximation of 3D de-velopable surfaces with user-defined soft folds at an interactive speed. The user can later apply nonlinear physical simulation to generate more realistic results. Experimental results demonstrated that soft folding is effective for producing complex folded shapes with controllable sharpness