3D texture

Hi!
Can anyone explain me? What is the use of 3D texture?

Thank you

I don’t really know why you would want to use one. But then again i don’t really understand them beyond the basics.

I don’t know much about 3d Textures but here is what i do know.

In a normal texture map that you put on faces (2d texture map), there are two coordinates. The u and the v. In a 3d texture map, there are three coordinates. The names of those coordinates can be whatever you want…u can use x,y,z if you want. Anyways, the 3d texture maps take up a lot of memory, so 3d texture maps are generated with procedures. Because of that it is also called procedural texturing. Check out this link for a very basic run down of what it is. It is the 6th slide
http://www-courses.cs.uiuc.edu/~cs319/proceduralshading_files/frame.html

i thought 3d texture maps where basically the same as 2d except it contains a height element. An example would be the grass in Tony Hawk pro skater 2x on XBOX.

probably wrong though

With the new generation of programmable hardware, texture data is less “texture” and more of a global data structure.

A great example would be how the people at stanford used a 3d texture as a scene graph to implement a raytracer on the gpu.
Here is a link, enjoy. http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/rtongfx/