I'm trying to write a Cg shader that determines each vertex's color by looking up some values in a 3-dim array that is updated regularly in the game loop. Currently, everytime the array changes, I update the vertex colors in the actual meshes with a script and use a standard vertex color shader to show them. That's a lot of work for the cpu, so I would rather pass the whole color value array to a custom shader and let it do the work. Is there a way to do so? If my array of colors would be twodimensional, I could pass it to the shader as a texture. Since there are no 3d textures in Unity, how do I get my 3-dim array into my shader? Is there a better way than breaking my array down to several 2d textures or combining these into a single large 2d texture?

Edit: Additional Information - What exactly I'm trying to do

In my script, I have got a 3-dimensional array that stores colors. Let's assume it's 16x16x16 in size. In my shader I want to determine the color of each vertex by its position in the world space by looking up and interpolating the corresponding values in my 3-dim color array. For example, if the vertex position vector is x = 2, y = 4, z = 3 then it should get the color in my colorArray at [2,4,3]. If its x coordinate would be 2.5 instead, its color would get interpolated from [2,4,3] and [3,4,3].

That's about it, I'm just searching the best way to pass the values in my array to the shader. The best I came up with yet is writing them into a single 2D texture with SetPixel. For my example of a 16x16x16 array, this texture would be 256x16 in size (or 64x64). That's all a workaround because Unity doesn't support 3D textures (yet).

So, is there a way to do this that is simpler than mine? The more I think about it, the more I doubt it.