Ok, I understand what a 1D and a 2D texture is. But what exactly is a 3d texture? how would I as an artist make one? What would programmers do with it after I did make one? Just curious as some of the programmers working on our in house engine just came and asked me if they needed to support 3d textures. I wasn't sure…
3d textures typically cant be compressed, hence they use more memory. Except for those now SM4 2d stacks that were mentioned. Which are just regular 2d textures in a big pack, so that you can easily pass many 2d textures to a shader, and not have to pass many 2d textures individually. A benefit of regular 3d textures is…
I would have thought it's something like voxels, your 3d colour cube is probably on the right track ... I guess it's much more likely to be a procedurally-generated texture (for example, those parametric noise/clouds/wood-grain procedurals that you get with most major 3D apps)... a 3D texture isn't really something you can…
In graphics-programmer-talk 3D textures are a lot like voxels actually. You can think of it as a stack of 2D textures and the w texture coordinate (u,v,w) picks which layer of the stack is sampled by u and v. 3D textures are primarily used in procedural effects like "Perlin Marble" or "Terrible Wood Shader" as found in…