[Closed] Idea for rendering volumetrics

I have an idea for rendering gasous volumtrics like clouds or smoke and I wanted to know if you all think it would work.

Basically I want to create a shader that creates a grayscale map of the thickness of a mesh. First the user would set a minimum and maximum depth. Rays would be case from the camera, if they hit the mesh object the entry and exit position would be recored and the distance between the two found. If that distance was less then the minimum depth it would return black, if it was greater then the maxium depth it would return white, and for all distances inbetween it would return a grayscale value. That shader could then be used as an opacity map in combination with a SSS shader for the diffuse value to fake a volumetric cloud.

So I guess my questions are:

1.) Is it worth the time? Does this sound like something that would produce a decent volumetric effect?

and

2.) If so, any ideas on how I’d go about making a shader that does such a thing?

I’ve been looking through the ray topics in the maxscript reference but I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for.

Thanks!

-Mad