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 mesh, 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 pixels.

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:

1. Import the texture into your project.
2. In the Project window, select the texture asset. Unity displays the texture import settings in the Inspector window.
3. In the Inspector window, set Texture Shape to 3D.
4. Set Columns and Rows to the appropriate values for your flipbook texture.
5. 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 3D, Columns to 8, and Rows to 8.

Refer to Importing textures for more information.

Additional resources

• Free VFX image sequences and flipbooks