Abstract: This paper presents a method for interactively rendering complex repetitive scenes such as landscapes, fur, organic tissues, etc. It is an adaptation to Z-buffer of volumetric textures, a ray-traced method, in order to use the power of existing graphics hardware. Our approach consists in slicing a piece of 3D geometry (one repetitive detail of the complex data) into a series of thin layers. A layer is a rectangle containing the shaded geometry that falls in that slice. These layers are used as transparent textures, that are mapped onto the underlying surface (e.g. a hill or an animal skin) with an extrusion offset. We show some results obtained with our first implementation, such as a scene of 13 millions of virtual polygons animated at 2.5 frames per second on a SGI 0².