Infinite Snowflakes

Snowflake decorations generated in OpenSCAD from a seed: every seed gives a different snowflake with six or eight arms. Each arm ends in a small ring for hanging, and a printed link hooks through the rings to join snowflakes.

Every seed prints in one piece: each branch starts on its arm’s spine and stops inside its arm’s wedge, so none are left floating.

Seeds 0.1, 0.5, 0.7 and 0.93

Use it

Open src/snowflakes.scad in OpenSCAD and set:

seed: any number. Each gives a different snowflake. Seeds 0.00 to 1.00 in steps of 0.01 all differ.
size: the span from the top arm’s tip to the bottom one’s, in mm (55 by default). The arms are 4 mm tall.

Render, then export an STL. The console prints the number of arms.

src/link.scad makes the connector: a 10 mm bar with an open hook at each end, meant to hook through the rings at the arm tips. length and width set its size.

Printing

Print flat. Side branches are 0.6 to 1.2 mm wide, so use a 0.4 mm nozzle or smaller.
Nothing reaches past the arm tips, so a snowflake is never wider than size.
Hang a snowflake by a thread through one ring, or join several with links.

Checks

just test takes about 6 s on OpenSCAD 2026.10.15. It renders every seed from 0.00 to 1.00 in steps of 0.01 and checks that each is one piece, 55 mm across, no wider, and 4 mm tall. It also checks that size scales the snowflake, and the link’s size.

just images renders the picture above. It needs ImageMagick’s montage.

Origin and licence

The snowflakes are a rewrite, under MIT, of an idea from Mariano Lambir’s Infinite Snowflakes on Printables: seeded snowflake decorations, hung and joined by links. The generator and the link are new code, so a seed gives a different snowflake than it did before. The earlier CC BY 4.0 versions are in this repository’s history. MIT; see LICENSE.