smigniot/treemakerweb

TreeMakerWeb is a browser version of TreeMaker, a well known piece of software for designing origami crease patterns, the fold lines you see printed on a sheet before you fold it into a shape. The original software, created by Robert J. Lang, works by letting you draw a simple stick figure of what you want to fold, such as an animal with legs, arms, and a tail, and then calculates how paper would need to be divided and packed to produce that shape. The clever part of this project is how it was ported to the browser. The original mathematical engine, written in C++, was compiled into WebAssembly, a format that lets C++ code run inside a web page at near native speed, and it runs in a background thread called a Web Worker so it does not freeze the page. Everything else, including the drawing interface, file handling, and visual rendering, was rewritten in TypeScript. Inside the app, you draw a tree by clicking to add nodes and dragging to move them, then you can add conditions like pinning a node to the paper's edge or fixing distances between points. The software then packs circles to figure out the most efficient layout, builds the full crease pattern with mountain and valley folds marked, and shows a preview of what the folded shape would roughly look like. You can open old TreeMaker files, save your own project files, and export finished crease patterns as SVG images or in the FOLD format used by other origami tools. Because it is a static site with the WebAssembly engine already built in, running it requires only Node.js during development, and once built, the whole thing can be hosted on any plain web server with no backend needed. The project follows the GPL v2 license, the same license as the original TreeMaker code it is built on. This is aimed at origami designers and hobbyists who want to design crease patterns without installing desktop software.