Using 2D / 3D textures with volumetrics? I've tried multiple times to get clouds into Blender. However, my scene has too many vertices for it to handle objects with multiple subdivision modifiers. I thought that, as an alternative, I could use a texture to tell Blender which parts of the volume were transparent and which parts had volumetric scattering.

However, when I plug my test shader into volume, I get a half transparent, half emission shader instead, though it works fine for the surface. I've tried using the Texture Coordinate node for the texture itself -- it did nothing.



Then I read about 3D textures on this thread. I tried to find about 3D textures in Blender, which was completely hopeless:


3D Volumetric Planetary Clouds in Cycles?
Volumetric gradient based on density?
Is it possible to convert a procedural texture into actual geometry?
cycles volume rendering 3D image texture (CT or MR dataset)
Creating a texture and normal map from a 3D model / scene
3d Textures from Flat texture


So my question is: How can I tell Cycles to use textures as a factor for a Mix Node, or how can I generate a 3D texture from a 2D procedural ,and use that in Blender? (And sorry about the extra stuff included in the screenshot. GIMP has weird exporting issues right now.)
Sure you can use 2D/3D textures with volumetrics.

All procedural cycles textures will be 3D and you can use them for example like this:



Or you can just project 2D textures on your mesh too, this is the same cube with some mask: