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3D Images
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Introduction
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3D images can be seen as the assembly of several 2D images in slices. They're good at capturing volume information and are used a lot in the medical and oil & gas fields. HOOPS Luminate supports 3D images both in the software and hardware renderers. However, such images can be really really big and some graphics hardware may not be able to handle them.

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Description
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Even if 3D images can be seen as "augmented" 2D images, there are some major differences between the two:

    * Mipmapping is not supported
    * Power-of-two as well as non-power-of-two images are addressed using texture coordinates in the [0,1]x[0,1]x[0,1] interval

Except for those points, 3D images can be seen exactly as 2D images with one more dimension.

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Creation of 3D Images
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3D image creation does not differ from other image creation methods and is quite simple:

.. include:: /tasks/ta_ca/ta_ca_image/tk_creating_a_3d_image.rst

In software rendering mode, any pixel format is supported for 3D images. In Hardware rendering mode, the list of supported pixel formats depends on the graphics card capabilities and may vary from one chipset to the other.

.. note:: 
    
    A complete example of real-life 3D image creation and rendering is shown in :doc:`/tutorials/workflows/wf_realtime/wf_volume_view`.