using 3D textures?

I do not know if this has been thought of before, but i what about rendering a 3D model to a 3D texture and use that for printing? The 3D texture should represent the printable area. You would get al xyz positions where material needs to be doposited. Printing would be more like normal printing and less like plotting.

With opengl creating a texure could work like this:
use orthogonal mode (2d)
render to texture
move camera
render to texture
move camera
etc
combine texture to 3d texture

shoot at it.

You mean like projecting an image or light-shape towards the table surface then depositing polymer on it until the whole thing is covered? And you woudl monitor the progress with a camera, right?
if this is right, the deposited polimer must be opaque and/or absorbant to light...

and then maybe i got you all wrong

No, i talk about preparing the 3d mesh for printing. Instead of plotting it it could be printed using data from a 3d texture. Limiting the number of moves for printing. I goes layer by layer and for a layer it will print row by row only printing when a pixel is set in the 3d texture. I hope this makes this explains the idea better.