Snowflakes are a true wonder of emergence in nature - a quintillion water molecules organized into a symmetric crystal of immense complexity, assembled through relatively simple interactions.

Is it possible to model snowflakes in software, and grow them on a computer screen?

My goal is to write a program that grows a snowflake, using physical principles and properties (like crystallization and humidity), as much as possible, to see if 6-point symmetry and random unique patterns will emerge.

On this site, I've gathered my experiments in computational snowflake generation.

There's videos and images of generated snowflakes in the gallery, or read up on the model.