The Visual Computer manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor)

Dendritic or branching structures are commonly seen in natural phenomena such as lightning, cracking and vegetal growth. They are also often used for artistic or decorative purposes. We present a new method for modeling dendritic structures based on a path planning approach. Our method includes the use of a partial nonscalar distance metric that gives us effective and flexible control handles over the evolving dendritic structure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by creating dendritic stylizations of input images. Small changes to our modeling process can allow for many different dendritic metaphors, ranging from vines and lightning to complex structures such as trees. We show how to use our system to create a particular form of hidden images, where modeleed tree branches contain faces from input images.