I'm attempting to play around with signed distance field rendering in D3D11, and I need to access multiple textures from the same pixel shader. The thing is, these are volume (3d) textures, not standard 2d textures, and I need to access them dynamically (ie. I need to be able to select the texture by an index or variable).
I'd love to use texture arrays, but to my knowledge there is no such thing as a 3d texture array.
I could use a set of if statements something like:
if (index == 0) texture0.Sample(sampler_state,location);
if (index == 1) texture1.Sample(sampler_state,location);
// ect...
but I can't see that being that fast.
My next option is to use 1 large 3d texture and simply use the index as an offset, but I risk hitting the limits on the texture dimensions, and total texture size.
I plan on using the textures as a sort of mipmap, but each subsequent texture won't be smaller than the last (they will all be the same size), rather each subsequent texture (or mip level) will cover a larger area. So I can't just use a 3d texture with mipmapping enabled (unless there is someway to specify the size of each mip level that I am unaware of).
Any suggestions or ideas?
