Turn a custom 2D shader into a 3D volume?

[martinortiz]

I’m assume I’m not the only one to come up with this idea…

Is there a methodology to take a custom HLSL 2D image/material and turn it into a 3D volume?

Say for example I have this lovely 2D material made using custom HLSL node…Looks great…then I thought…it would be cool to convert this into a 3D version / volume. Are there examples of doing this?

Here’s an example 2D shader…a swirling sparkly system that looks great even if it’s only in 2D…it would be fantastic to convert it into 3D.

[martinortiz]

I think 3D Volumetric textures is a good approach…
The big issue is creating the slices of the 3D texture cube.
That sounds difficult to do.
You could use the same texture throughout the whole texture cube and that would be easy to do…but it would not look good.
Plus you don’t just want one static 3D volume…you want something similar to 3D cloud volumes. Where the look of it makes sense.