What are 3D textures useful for?

[Michele Bosi]

Hello to all,
googling around (and yahooing to be politically correct...) I realized how difficult it is to find sample applications that demonstrate some practical use of 3D textures, so here I am with a very simple question: in your experience, why do we need 3D textures and what can we use (or abused) them for?

Cheers,
mic

[Chris Lux]

Volume Rendering

e.g. http://www.vrvis.at/via/resources/course-volgraphics-2004/

[sqrt[-1]]

3D textures get used a lot as 3D noise lookups.

[zeoverlord]

Terrain texturing is also a possible area of use.

[Ilian Dinev]

Nice soft shadows, too. (but the preprocessing is slow). A 3D texture was used as the volume of light. There's a demo, I don't remember where.

[arekkusu]

Any time you've ever written

value = table[i][j][k]

is an application for 3D textures.

[Michele Bosi]

Thank you guys for your replyes, it was enlighting :)

Cheers,
mic