A couple days ago I noticed a fun piece of R code by Allan Roberts, which lets you create a digital snowflake by cutting out virtual triangles. Go give it a try. Roberts inspired me to create a whole night sky of snowflakes. I tried to make the snowfall look as organic as possible. There are lots of options to adjust. Here’s the code, have fun and Happy Holidays!
# Code by Matt Asher for statisticsblog.com # Feel free to modify and redistribute # How many flakes do you want to fall? flakes = 100 # Width and height of your space width = 800 height = 600 # Initial wind wind = 0 # Setup the background of the plot and margins par(bg = "black") par(oma=c(0,0,0,0)) par(mar=c(0,0,0,0)) plot(0, 0, col="black", pch=".", xlim=c(0,width), ylim=c(0,height), axes=F) for(i in 1:flakes) { startY = height startX = runif(1,1,width) xPos = startX yPos = startY for(j in 1:height) { # Optional drift in wind wind = wind + rcauchy(1,0,.05) # Update snowflake position xPos = xPos + rnorm(1,.1,1.5) yPos = yPos - runif(1,4,20) # Are we in the space, if so display it if(xPos > 0 && xPos <= width && yPos > 0 && yPos <= height) { points(round(xPos), round(yPos), col="white", pch=8) # System dely, slows down the flakes Sys.sleep(0.1) } } }
Tags: r, simulation, snowflakes
Your code got messed up a bit when copying it to the blog (if statement at the end). Here’s a version ready for copying into R: https://gist.github.com/4298885
Thanks Didier!