Dendro is a volumetric modeling plug-in for Grasshopper-3D built on top of the OpenVDB library. It provides multiple ways to wrap points, curves, and meshes as a volumetric data within Grasshopper-3D, allowing you to perform various operations on those volumes. Dendro includes components for boolean, smoothing, offsets, and morphing operations. You can find out more details of its features here or download a working version here
We have been using the OpenVDB library for a couple years, but needed something to prototype quicker with. We had built a rough version of this for Grasshopper-3D, but decided to package it up nicer and put a release together. Hopefully it is something to build upon and our hope was it could serve as a starting point to add more features and functionality to.
The goal was to make Dendro integrate into Grasshopper-3D as seamlessly as possible. Whereas many voxel solutions require you to think of geometry as living with a bounding box, Dendro makes working with volumes no different than handling any other geometry in Grasshopper-3D. Dendro works with many native Grasshopper-3D components, avoiding the 'blocking' found in other plugins, and allowing you to move in and out of volume operations very quickly.
Dendro contains two projects, a C++ project for working with OpenVDB and a C# project creating the Grasshopper-3D plugin.
C++ dependencies are installed using vcpkg on build, see Get started with vcpkg. The project are using a manifest file to list dependencies.
Since there are multiple versions of Rhino, each with their specific SDK, we added the Rhinocommon and Grasshopper-3D libraries as a nuget package in order to let you specifically target your desired Rhino version. That can be changed by Right-clicking the C# project, then selecting Manage Nuget Packages, clicking the Installed tab, Selecting your desired package, and finally, changing the Version in the right panel.
Dendro is built using Microsoft Visual Studio 2022, but you should be able to re-target for other versions.
Add the folder bin\Debug (or bin\Release) to library paths for Grasshopper using GrasshopperDeveloperSettings.
C++ code should be formatted using clang-formatter (included in Visual Studio). The Microsoft style was selected as it seemed to be closest to existing code style. clang-formatter settings can be found in .clang-format
C# code is formatted according to the .editorconfig file.
Add the following setting to ignore formatting commit(s) when using git blame.
git config blame.ignoreRevsFile .git-blame-ignore-revs
Dendro is using OpenVDB. For more information on the library, please visit here.