Surface nanostructuring is one of the most important laser application. Single shot laser action produces fancy three dimensional (3D) patterns on an illuminated boundary. Initially a target is absolutely flat — it possesses a translational two-dimensional symmetry along a boundary. In the paper two sources of the three dimensionality and their interplay are considered. One of them is melting and a nucleation of voids in molten condensed matter as a result of development of random thermal fluctuations, while the another is a tangential gradient of fluence ∇⊥ F along a boundary. The mechanisms which transfer those sources into the final structures are described below. They start with spallation of a thin pellicle due to a thermomechanical rupture, continue with a capillary interaction inside a foam like transient volume structures mechanically connected with a pellicle, and finish with freezing of those 3D liquid structures back into solid.