Dendro

PAACADEMY provides online courses on the Dendro plugin for Grasshopper, teaching computational designers how to generate complex organic forms and smooth booleans using voxel-based volumetric modeling.

Dendro is a Grasshopper plugin that brings voxel-based volumetric modeling to the parametric design environment, using the OpenVDB data format to represent 3D geometry as volumetric fields rather than surfaces. This allows designers to create forms through volumetric operations: growing, blending, subtracting, and morphing 3D volumes in ways that NURBS or mesh surface modeling cannot replicate efficiently.

At PAACADEMY, Dendro is utilized to overcome the traditional limitations of mesh intersections, specifically focusing on:

• Organic Blending: Creating perfectly smooth, continuous blends between intersecting tubes, lattices or architectural members without the geometry failing or "breaking."
• Volumetric Booleans: Executing complex addition and subtraction operations on highly organic shapes instantly.
• 3D Printing Workflows: Converting complex line networks into solid, watertight volumetric meshes that are guaranteed to be 3D-printable without non-manifold edge errors.