Parametric Fractal Snowflake

thingiverse

This is my first snowflake design for the BlocksCAD Snowflake competition, created using the BlocksCAD program after designing it on paper first. The design loosely follows the Koch snowflake fractal pattern, a characteristic that real-life snowflakes exhibit. I chose this approach because it's easy to achieve with scripted programs like BlocksCAD, rather than drawing-based software which is what I'm used to. I've made my design almost entirely parametric, allowing users to adjust settings such as the radius, line thickness, snowflake height, and number of iterations from the beginning of the code. This makes it simple for anyone to modify and customize their own snowflake to fit their printing needs. Unfortunately, I don't have a printer to test print this design on yet, but I'd love to collaborate with someone who does. The attached files include designs for iterations 1-5 at 1mm line thickness. However, any more than five iterations at this scale is largely pointless due to the thickness of the lines. I suspect that this project could be optimized using a recursive function, but I don't have the necessary knowledge or experience to implement such a design yet. I've recently started learning basic programming in Python and Matlab, discovering that I truly enjoy it. BlocksCAD's intuitive approach to coding makes the process visual and easy to learn, and its loop function enables me to create fractal shapes like this one with ease.