Create a 3D texture
A 3D texture is a bitmap image that contains information in three dimensions rather than the standard two. 3D textures are commonly used to simulate volumetric effects such as fog or smoke, to approximate a volumetric 3D meshThe main graphics primitive of Unity. Meshes make up a large part of your 3D worlds. Unity supports triangulated or Quadrangulated polygon meshes. Nurbs, Nurms, Subdiv surfaces must be converted to polygons. More info
See in Glossary, or to store animated textures and blend between them.
To create a 3D texture, import a 2D texture with the following properties:
- Flipbook format - a single 2D texture arranged as regular cells.
- Maximum size of 2048 × 2048 × 2048 pixelsThe smallest unit in a computer image. Pixel size depends on your screen resolution. Pixel lighting is calculated at every screen pixel. More info
See in Glossary.
The size of a 3D texture on disk and in memory increases quickly as its resolution increases. For example, a 3D texture with RGBAFloat format, no mipmaps, and a size of 32 × 32 × 32 pixels has a size of 512 KB (32 × 32 × 32 × 16 bytes) in memory. If you increase the resolution to 256 × 256 × 256 pixels, the size in memory becomes 256 MB (256 × 256 × 256 × 16 bytes).
Follow these steps to import:
- Import the texture into your project.
- In the Project window, select the texture asset. Unity displays the texture import settings in the InspectorA Unity window that displays information about the currently selected GameObject, asset or project settings, allowing you to inspect and edit the values. More info
See in Glossary window. - In the Inspector window, set Texture Shape to 3D.
- Set Columns and Rows to the appropriate values for your flipbook texture.
- Select Apply.
Unity adds a 3D texture slice for each cell in the texture.
An imported flipbook texture with 8 columns and 8 rows.
The texture after you set Texture Shape to 2D, Columns to 8, and Rows to 8.
Refer to Importing textures for more information.