Parametric Fractal Snowflake

cults3d

This is my first snowflake design for the BlocksCAD Snowflake competition; I designed it on paper first (loosely based on the Koch snowflake fractal pattern) then created it using the BlocksCAD program. I wanted to make a fractal pattern because that's what snowflakes are like in real life and it would be easy to create with a scripted program, rather than drawing-based software like I'm used to. I have made my design almost totally parametric, meaning that you can change things like the radius, line thickness, snowflake height, and of course the number of iterations. These are all displayed right from the beginning of the code, so it should be easy for you to modify and customise your own snowflake, to fit your printing requirements (unfortunately I don't have a printer to test print this on... yet... Thingiverse? BlocksCAD? hit me up... ;) ). I've included files for iterations 1-5 at 1mm line thickness, but any more than 5 iterations at this size is mostly pointless because they are lost in the thickness of the lines. I also have a feeling this project could be accomplished a lot more succinctly with a recursive function, but I don't really have the knowledge or experience to design something like that yet. I've only recently started learning some basic programming in python and Matlab, and discovered that I really like it. I also love how intuitive BlocksCAD makes the actual code process; it's so visual and easy to learn. And the fact that it has a loop function means that it is really easy to make fractal shapes like this one. I hope you like it!