Origami Common Wildebeest

Common wildebeest (or gnu) is a type of large antelope with flat face, big & striped shoulder, mane on the back, and shaggy beard. Often featured in African savannah wildlife documentary, shown in massive herds that migrate in search of grazing area. Usually the next scene would be their death; eaten by lions, leopards, hyenas, wild dogs, crocodiles -- you name it.

Design

Back in 2021, I made a simple wildebeest for a daily design challenge. That wildebeest's stripes were made out of crimps, and it was thick as hell. Some time later, I learned about distributing pleats into smaller flaps, and got an idea to replace the crimps with it. The base would look like this:

When the pleats are lifted a bit, skinny shadow will be casted which gives illusion of stripe. The pleats on top can be shaped into mane like Kamiya's inoshishigami. However months later Katsuta published his tiger that used the same idea. Instead of going ahead with "not copied Katsuta" mantra, I gave up the design. Besides, using structure that is too similar with Kamiya's inoshishigami would not be satisfying.

Fast forward to 2025, I found "common-wildebeest-draft.ori" file while tidying up my origami folder with the following content:

I couldn't remember when and why was that design drafted, but obviously the idea was to use traditional color changed stripes instead of pleats. Given that there hasn't been any complex wildebeest origami out there (that I know of), maybe this design deserved to be finished.

Color changed stripes are basically made out of pleats that end with raw edge. When the pleat angle is skewed, the raw edges will expose skinny triangular color changes. All we need is having such pleats near the front part of the wildebeest base.

Start with a pleated paper, and fold in half. Slowly slide the fold-in-half while skewing the pleat angle, and you'll get stripes.

Quadruped animal origamis with many features in the front tend to share similar rear layout: diagonal symmetry, with bird base in the corner (or fish base, if the tail is much shorter than legs). One flap will be used as tail, the other two as hind legs, and the remaining one are connected to the front part. This is why the design started from the rear part.

I used bird base for the leg & torso instead of other proportion such as  \(2:1+\sqrt{2}\) to make the legs as long as possible, relative to the torso. Complex quadruped looks better when the legs are shaped with bends and end with hoof/paw/claw, and these features eat a lot of paper. We need to allocate larger amount of paper on the legs, even more so on the rear legs. Kamiya suggested 20% more than the actual leg length.

Common leg & torso structure for diagonal symmetry quadruped.
Left: \(2:1+\sqrt{2}\)
Right: \(1:1\), the "torso river" will appear when the legs are folded down.

At this point I knew that the raw corners on the sides will be used for color changed stripes, but no idea about the best layout. Also no idea about the head part. It needs some flaps for horns, ears, eyes, beard, and color changed face. These questions are best answered when we have better idea on how the current structure would look like when folded, so I went ahead to put a placeholder bases and test-folded it.

This draft uses arbitrary proportion (thirds).

Many experiments were done on the test fold. There should be enough paper in the front part to create all of the head features, so there's no need to alter the proportion. To figure out how the creases should be structured, I frequently transform part of the base, cycling around waterbomb, half fish half bird base, bird base, and fish base using sink/unsink. These transformations change the flap/river length, and we can select the best one.

Cycling through the bases: waterbomb, half fish half bird, bird, then fish.

Eventually the following base was produced. 

The flap assignment was trivial. Unassigned flaps are marked with single letter, and the plan is to use A, B, and D as parts of the beard. We might be able to spread these thick middle flaps apart like what was done on markhor.

I spent some time playing with the test fold, and got an idea to use flap C. It is a short middle flap buried inside. Perhaps it can be sunk, forming an inverted flap, then pulled out from the backside, producing the back mane.

Rudimentary version where flap C is sunk into inverted flap, then raised from the back.
See the little white triangle on the folded model's top.

The mane was laughably too small. We can enlarge it, but it was difficult to do without mush. Eventually I realized it can be done if at the same time crimps are introduced on the base of the hind legs.

Hind legs are crimped down, which allows the mane to be raised further up 

We can make it even larger by realizing that the narrow triangular shape can be opened, widening the back mane. I did it with mush, but looking inside the model, many vaguely 22.5 creases were automatically made, so there should be a flat foldable 22.5 solution to do this. Later we can open the model and draw the crease pattern to correct the mush to flat foldable solution. 

The internal layers were mushed

The crimps on the rear leg parts made the rear legs hang too low. Lifting it up and folding it back down fixed it, but the rear leg will end up too short. Luckily there is a better way: release the trapped layers before folding the legs.

Release this trapped layer

What remained on the rear part was tail and hoof shaping. Tail can be shaped with straightforward color change, just like usual horse origami. For hoof, instead of a simple pleat, I wanted an actual cloven hoof. This can be done efficiently using outside reverse fold, lift up the internal layers to widen the tip, and either sink or inside reverse fold the tip.

Efficient cloven hoof, with small amount of length-loss.

Rear part done, now let's figure out the front part. I couldn't find any good way to make face color-change while keeping the ears undisturbed, so the ears were reassigned to use short middle flaps under the horns (flap D). The initial ear flaps can be repurposed to make eyes.

As the test fold got too small, I made a test on 15 cm paper specific for the head part. We can color change the face and add nostrils. The middle flap right under the color changed face (flap A) was sunk to easily produce lips right under the nostrils. The hard thing were the eyes.

Assuming the eyes will be tiny squares, there are several design choices. Komatsu elaborated it comprehensively on his mouse blog post. The eye without seam and color changed is commonly used for "goofy" or cute model. Eye with vertical seam looks great for creature with vertical slit pupil such as cats, lizards, and snakes. I think herbivore better use the eye with horizontal seam to make it look chill. Moreover when not color changed, the seam acts like horizontal pupil. It worked really well on my markhor, so that's what I strived for here.

Initial head with horizontal-seamed eye, and color changed nostrils & face

That first solution was janky. Upon integration to actual full body test fold, I noticed this eye was too far on the side.

Test fold with double tissue

Eventually it was reworked and a non-janky solution was found. The structure was straightforward, as shown on the final detailed crease pattern.

Better solution

Figuring out the beard shaping was unexpectedly the most fun part. There are plenty of papers accumulated on the underside of the neck. I randomly opened pointy 22.5 middle flaps and try to make wide layers which can support angled pleats. This used some 11.25 creases as seen on the final detailed crease pattern.

I did one last test fold to put everything together before starting the final fold, while correcting the back mane mush to a proper flat foldable crease pattern, which can also be seen on the final crease pattern.

Fold

I prepared duo unryu, with brown and dark brown color, 60 cm in size. Its thickness made the shoulder so thick that it's hard to shape, and also made the head part collapse prone to inaccuracy.

Obligatory initial square picture

Initial collapse

Head part collapsed

Collapsed, ready for detailing and shaping