love.graphics.newVolumeImage
Creates a new volume (3D) Image.

Volume images are 3D textures with width, height, and depth. They can't be rendered directly, they can only be used in Shader code (and sent to the shader via Shader:send).

To use a volume image in a Shader, it must be declared as a VolumeImage or sampler3D type (instead of Image or sampler2D). The Texel(VolumeImage image, vec3 texcoords) shader function must be used to get pixel colors from the volume image. The vec3 argument is a normalized texture coordinate with the z component representing the depth to sample at (ranging from 1).

Volume images are typically used as lookup tables in shaders for color grading, for example, because sampling using a texture coordinate that is partway in between two pixels can interpolate across all 3 dimensions in the volume image, resulting in a smooth gradient even when a small-sized volume image is used as the lookup table.

Array images are a much better choice than volume images for storing multiple different sprites in a single array image for directly drawing them.
image = love.graphics.newVolumeImage( layers, settings )
layers table A table containing filepaths to images (or File, FileData, ImageData, or CompressedImageData objects), in an array. A table of tables can also be given, where each sub-table represents a single mipmap level and contains all layers for that mipmap.
settings (nil) table Optional table of settings to configure the volume image, containing the following fields:
settings.mipmaps (false) boolean True to make the image use mipmaps, false to disable them. Mipmaps will be automatically generated if the image isn't a compressed texture format.
settings.linear (false) boolean True to treat the image's pixels as linear instead of sRGB, when gamma correct rendering is enabled. Most images are authored as sRGB.
image Image A volume Image object.