Making Snowflakes

Do you have any favorite ways to generate snowflakes? I just found this and have been too engrossed playing with it to keep searching for others…

http://paulkaplan.me/SnowflakeGenerator/

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Oh, that one’s a rabbit hole! :smile:

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That one is cute and all but , and @Jules knows what my answer is already, do these in Fusion 360 and it makes a great little lesson in using mirror and circular patterns. Something you may not have experimented with yet.

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Oh but that’s a great idea. I’ve used those features for other design elements (like gears) and it somehow did not occur to me that I should try making a snowflake in F360. Thanks @markevans36301 this is exactly the kind of gem for which I was hoping…

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For randomly generating snowflakes, I wrote one https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:188481 for 3D printing, which Tom Speller tweaked to make laser-cuttable snowflakes https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:570835/ . So you can generate a ‘blizzard’ of unique snowflakes, either for 3d printing or laser cutting!

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I should point out - it’s an OpenSCAD script, do you’d need to install that language from OpenSCAD.org. And the script generates .dxf files, and it’d have to be tweaked slightly to generate svg files.

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oh super cool, thanks! this looks really fun.

The tweaked shell script is just to change the file extension from dxf to svg. OpenSCAD knows to write out a different format depending on the extension of the output file. Cool, eh?

#!/bin/bash
for i in seq 1 250;
do
openscad -D seed=$i -o ./flakes/snowflake-$i.svg ./snowflake2dV1.scad
done

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oh gosh, I didn’t know that. Thanks for the code - you saved me a bunch of time there.

Pleased to be of service!

I use radial cloning in Inkscape, but that’s a great resource.

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Um…radial cloning? Which button is that? I suppose this means there will be a trip to youtube…

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Yeah, it’s a bit involved so Youtube will be your friend here. You can find it under Edit -> Clone -> Create Tiled Clone. You then just put in rotation angles and how many clones you want. You do want to make sure the rotation center crosshairs of the object are at the point you want them to rotate around first.

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That was fun!

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