Thingiverse
Koch Snowflake Ornament by pikafoop
by Thingiverse
Last crawled date: 4 years, 7 months ago
Koch Snowflake Ornament
I wanted to make an ornament to give to relatives and friends this Christmas, like some crocheted ornaments I've received in the past. To make this feasible, I needed a quick-printing and relatively sturdy design. I also wanted something mathematically interesting.
Inspired by SimonFront's Koch Snowflake, especially the way that it used multiple iterations of the fractal to make a single design, I decided to rethink his design for spiralized printing on FDM printers.
They print very quickly, so make a lot and share them this Christmas! They should scale very easily in Cura, if you want a whole blizzard of various flakes.
Each object is a stack of Koch Snowflakes with different number of iterations from n to 1. For instance, "Koch 3" has 3 iterations on the bottom, 2 iterations in the middle, and 1 iteration on top. This gives the object a little bit of depth and interest, and also helps it keep its shape.
I printed these with glow-in-the-dark filament. "Koch 3" and "Koch 4" are pictured. It is easier to see the pattern in "Koch 3", but "Koch 4" looks more "fluffy", and so it is my custom Christmas ornament for this year. "Koch 5" is unlikely to work very well unless you scale it up or print with a smaller shell size. If you do make one, please share a photo!
For more information on the Koch Snowflake fractal, see Wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake
I wanted to make an ornament to give to relatives and friends this Christmas, like some crocheted ornaments I've received in the past. To make this feasible, I needed a quick-printing and relatively sturdy design. I also wanted something mathematically interesting.
Inspired by SimonFront's Koch Snowflake, especially the way that it used multiple iterations of the fractal to make a single design, I decided to rethink his design for spiralized printing on FDM printers.
They print very quickly, so make a lot and share them this Christmas! They should scale very easily in Cura, if you want a whole blizzard of various flakes.
Each object is a stack of Koch Snowflakes with different number of iterations from n to 1. For instance, "Koch 3" has 3 iterations on the bottom, 2 iterations in the middle, and 1 iteration on top. This gives the object a little bit of depth and interest, and also helps it keep its shape.
I printed these with glow-in-the-dark filament. "Koch 3" and "Koch 4" are pictured. It is easier to see the pattern in "Koch 3", but "Koch 4" looks more "fluffy", and so it is my custom Christmas ornament for this year. "Koch 5" is unlikely to work very well unless you scale it up or print with a smaller shell size. If you do make one, please share a photo!
For more information on the Koch Snowflake fractal, see Wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake