Reiter snowflake growth model

The previous post's quick cellular automaton approach to snowflakes was a bit crude. For more realism (but still with a lot of oversimplification), I wrote code for the Reiter snowflake growth model. This is a "real-valued" cellular automaton (or a finite-differences evolution).

With some randomness, things look even more realistic:

Cellular automaton snowflake generator

I made a simple cellular automaton snowflake generator in OpenSCAD. By default it uses Stephen Wolfram's rule that a hex cell stays alive once alive and a cell is generated if it has exactly one neighbor.

Christmas Day addition:
Adding a tiny bit of indeterminism--a chance of 0.5 of generating a cell instead of certainty--makes things look more like a real snowflake, though. Tap on Customizer in the above link if you want to play with it.

And here it is on our Christmas tree. Merry Christmas!