For those in the bay area, there is a great origami store in japan town called the paper tree which I highly recommend. Last time I was there they had some truly amazing pieces on display including many of Lang's insects and sculptures as well as a ryujin 3.5 designed by satoshi kamiya.
You've hit upon some of my favorite pieces. Any of Lang's opus pieces are amazing (I really like the rock climber that sticks out of a piece of paper).
Satoshi Kamiya's works are also pretty darn amazing (the wizard, the dragons, etc.).
Lang really brought out the science in origami (he's en ex-rocket scientist turned origami pro), and wrote software for calculating the fold patterns and extraction points from paper for pulling out points of manipulation (like limbs, etc.)
Interesting (to me) that if you pause the video at 38 seconds you see a mesh of triangles... which are the same building blocks the computer uses to create 3d objects as well.
Prof Erik Demaine of MIT pioneers the field of computational origami. I do not know the details of his research. But there are practical applications like fitting large space probes into narrow rockets. Or making machines that flex without explicit hinges.
You have this nice simulator that he actually contributed to that shows this connection between meshes and folded origami! https://origamisimulator.org
The steps this craft has taken to evolve over time would be so interesting to watch *cough* unfold.
Start with basic shapes. Then work towards branching element. Later form that into body shapes. Make the detail start forming from the rough structure. Continuously refine from there. It feels like watching a lifeform or fractal grow in realtime.
More so than any other culture I am aware of, Japanese culture seems to prize things take take a lot of time and skill. For example bonsai, katana blades, origami.
I made a David Brill horse during first lockdown. Took me a couple of hours and had always wanted to give it a go. Here is an example[1] online. It's made from an equilateral triangle.
It looks more like moulding clay than origami folding I remember form a kid. Part way through you can see the basic form take shape and get pressed down into the samurai. Cool stuff!
I know you can design crease patterns with cuttle.xyz and import them into origamisimulator.org to watch them fold, although I haven't tried it personally. I can't imagine being able to do something as wildly complicated as the samurai though.
I think its a combination of software and prototyping from what I've read about origami artists. (software like Treemaker [0] for making crease patterns etc)
For people looking at more of the mathematical side of how origamis are shaped and built, I recommend a wonderful book by Robert Lang: "Twists, Tilings, and Tessellations: Mathematical Methods for Geometric Origami"
This really covers a lot of ground on computational origami.
Oragami is amazing, in part, because it's a reversible process unlike painting or sculpture. There's a certain beauty to purely non-destructive creation.
