Pyroduct
Realistic, parametric 3D lava tubes for Earth, the Moon and Mars.
Space architecture and planetary studies often draw lava tube interiors as notional shapes. Pyroduct builds them from the geometry of real caves instead: a plug-in for Grasshopper that generates lava tubes from a Catalog of more than a thousand surveyed cross-sections.
See it in action
A demo on the Moon: the lava tube below the Marius Hills Pit, modelled with Pyroduct. More demos and tutorials will follow on YouTube.
Two parts, one project
The software and the dataset are published separately on Zenodo, each with its own DOI.
Pyroduct software
A free plug-in for Grasshopper in Rhinoceros 3D. Choose a planetary body, a length and a level of detail, and it returns a lava tube mesh ready for analysis, design studies, volcanic hazard work or VR.
Version 2.0, Grasshopper User Objects with example files
Pyroduct Digital Catalog
The largest morphological dataset of terrestrial lava tubes: more than 1,200 cross-sections from 119 caves in 11 countries, digitised from the literature and from LiDAR surveys.
Version 3.0, DXF, TXT and XLSX/CSV
The paper
The method, the Catalog and the validation against LiDAR surveys of three caves are described in Pyroduct: A novel parametric software for the simulation of terrestrial, lunar, and Martian lava tubes, published in Icarus in 2026.
How to cite
If Pyroduct or the Catalog is useful in your work, please cite the paper together with the version of the software or data you used.
Paper
Romio, F. A. P., Lobosco, G., Sauro, F., Pozzobon, R., & Marraffa, A. (2026). Pyroduct: A novel parametric software for the simulation of terrestrial, lunar, and Martian lava tubes. Icarus, 447, 116904. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2025.116904
Software
Romio, F. A. P., Lobosco, G., Sauro, F., Pozzobon, R., & Marraffa, A. (2025). Pyroduct: The First Realistic and Parametric Lava Tube Generator for Earth, Moon, and Mars (Version 2.0) [Software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17740882
Dataset
Romio, F. A. P., Marraffa, A., et al. (2026). Pyroduct Digital Catalog (Version 3.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14535885