Plaited Polyhedral Models

The following models are all built from lightweight card stock; I wrote matlab scripts to generate the data, then printed it using a color laser printer.

By way of explanation as to how to come up with these things, I've overlaid some of the starting data on a photograph of one of the solid plaited models that I built, here.

There's one logical strip here. The background color shades from mid-grey to black, based on the distance from an arbitrarily placed point; it was not as useful as I had hoped, when it came to putting the model together. At each crossing point, the black dot marks the underside and the two colored dots match (this is useful at assembly time).
Postscript (This uses level 3 features; ghostview's ps2ps can rewrite it for a level 2 printer.)

Since layouts of points that result in there being a single logical strip seem easy to generate, I decided to try one with a color ramp along it.

Something to line up the crossing points on is still needed, so I settled for randomly chosen shades of grey; I wished there were more of them.
Postscript (Again, level 3 devices can be hard to find.)

Some sleight of hand was necessary to get rid of the crossing point markers; if you look closely, over and under are still marked, and the positioning was done using a mock-up that had more markings provided.

The photograph's been touched up a little to pump up the colors; there's just too much white to make the color pop out. I had chosen the arrowhead design to de-emphasize cutting irregularities (trimming a consistent distance outside a line is taxing), which I think was successful.
Postscript (arrowheads)
Postscript (template)

I hope to provide the matlab scripts soon; for now, my working directory is choked up with failed attempts and my RCS logs are downright embarrassing, so I need to sort out which bits are actually useful.