The Origami Forum

Hello everyone, hopefully I'm in the right subforum for this. I was hoping someone here could evaluate something for me. I am aware that Montroll has a hydra design, but to date I have only seen a messy fold of it that I couldn't make much sense of, and the final diagrams from the index have never been very informative to me from his books. I have never actually seen the book myself.

Anyway, I am trying to determine how similar this is to Montroll's hydra:

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v281/ ... hydra1.jpg[/img]
[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v281/ ... hydra2.jpg[/img]

I apologize for the poor photo quality and some sloppy folds. I've always been a bad photographer, and I'm currently running low on decent paper to work with (so I used stuff that quickly became sticky and left dye on my hands...oh well). I will have diagrams soon if the photos aren't sufficient to tell. Please let me know, thanks.

To my eye, your model bears resemblance to Montroll's 3 headed dragon, from Mythological Creatures.. book.
A fair rendition, if you were able to reproduce it from merely a picture.

I'm confused...is the 3-headed dragon design the same as the hydra model that has wings? The one in the photo was not reproduced from a picture, but was rather a casual response to one of the many "now fold (fill in random animal)!" requests I've gotten over time.

You also might take a look at the dragon/hydra by Neale, as well as Anibal Voyer's model.
Fairly similar to your model.
Sorry that I can't be more helpful...

Looks similar to a Cerebus...

You also might take a look at the dragon/hydra by Neale, as well as Anibal Voyer's model.
Fairly similar to your model.

Is it this one? http://spinflipper.com/blog/wp-content/ ... /08/21.jpg Again this is another I'm unfamiliar with so I'm not sure if I found the right thing. I have not found an example of the Anibal Voyer one (maybe I'm searching for the wrong thing).

Looks similar to a Cerebus...

Ah...google books was my friend for once hahah. Interesting that it shows that one in full. The Cerberus may answer my question entirely. I see some differences starting when the back is handled and propagating after that, but a good reference for similarity in the source of the heads. I can probably ask a better question now to clear up my little bit of remaining curiosity about the hydra pattern: is the hydra from the same book just a Cerberus with some extra grafts for wings, or is the whole base different in some fundamental way?

Actually, yours looks absolutely nothing like either John Montroll's or Anibal Voyer's 3-Headed dragons. And not like Fernando Gilgado's or anyone else's I've seen for that matter. It has three heads, four legs, and a tail, but the similarities really end there.

Also, everyone else has simply called them 3-headed dragons, not hydra. And a Cerberus is a 3-headed dog.

Cerebus is a 3 headed dog with a snake like tail. Add some grafts and, yeah, this will be great.

However, your piece has almost no resemblance to the Montroll and Annibal Dragons, theirs have 3 heads, 2 legs and 2 arms and 2 wings- which you lack.

Still, good luck in designing, and if you draw diagrams, that would be great. Eileen Tan's Hydra is quite similar to yours, he uses a Neale dragon base with edge grafts.

I think I just found diagrams for the Anibal Voyer dragon that was mentioned. This is what I'm reading: http://dev.origami.com/images_pdf/dragon_3heads.pdf

I like that one a lot. I will have to fold it once I have some bigger paper. In fact the grafts are a lot more complicated than what I did and it goes completely differently after that. I guess a lot of 3-headed designs look superficially similar in that they have two ears/horns and a mouth for each head, but internal differences get well-hidden as the folding goes on.

legionzilla wrote:However, your piece has almost no resemblance to the Montroll and Annibal Dragons, theirs have 3 heads, 2 legs and 2 arms and 2 wings- which you lack.

Initially I thought the wings on the Montroll design might just be an extra pre-bird-base graft (since I still haven't seen that part of the book) on the same basic idea as the Cerberus, but I now understand that is not the case.

origamimasterjared wrote:Also, everyone else has simply called them 3-headed dragons, not hydra. And a Cerberus is a 3-headed dog.

I will switch to that term, thanks. I think that was part of why I was having trouble finding examples of other multi-headed dragon designs. Is "hydra" reserved for the ones with specific numbers of heads?

Although there are differences (my model ended up more dragon-ish than not dog-ish I think), the early steps of Montroll's Cerberus pattern still seem most similar to 3-headed dragon I made.

legionzilla wrote:Eileen Tan's Hydra is quite similar to yours, he uses a Neale dragon base with edge grafts.

As seems to be typical of my searches I'm having trouble finding a picture of this one.

Anyway, I have finally finished diagramming the one I made. It is a first draft and I doubt it is free of errors since I was quite tired when diagramming, but hopefully the figures are correct enough in most cases that any similarities and differences to other models will be more clear. Unfortunately I do not yet have my university web space set up to upload the pdf there, so I have uploaded the draft to my deviantart page. I hope the direct link will work:

http://www.deviantart.com/download/1289 ... aQuick.pdf

It is not complicated of course, which is why I thought it likely that similar things would already exist. By the time I have a non-draft version of the instructions I would like to be able to include references to any designs that bear strong similarity (Montroll's Cerberus will probably be one).

A hydra is a serpent like creature with many heads. Herakles fought it in ancient Greek legend.

Cerberus is the 3 headed dog of the underworld. It doesn't have to have a serpent's tail, that's just artistic freedom.

A hydra is supposed to have many heads. Most have about 7-9, but some have hundreds!!! An example could be Eileen Tan's 12 head hydra.

Nothing wrong with calling it a hydra. You're the artist--you can call it whatever you want. I was just letting you know why you weren't finding lots of other hydra. Usually we use that term for the ones with a lot of heads, as the creature of myth had. Eileen Tan has one of those, somewhere on her website or blog at http://spinflipper.com

After looking at your diagrams, I don't really see any similarity to any of the other things with 3 heads. It's more like you took your regular Bob Neale style dragon, added a border graft, and changed the wings into heads. As I remember, I think your basic dragon was the same basic idea as Neale's (or maybe it wasn't and just looks similar to Neale's.)

There's no need to credit your design to any sources that were not inspiration behind it. Since you had never seen or heard of any of these that were mentioned, they can't really have influenced your decision to create this dragon, y'know?