This work addresses the issue of volume scattering effects within the context of the physical optics (PO) approach. This decreases the modeling and computational effort to simulate scattering from complex material compositions. It is shown that there is a natural progression from the classical PO for perfect electric conductors over the PO for dielectric scatterers towards the proposed formulation. Four specializations of the general algorithm are presented to emphasize the versatility of this approach. Details regarding the implementation of the proposed examples are described. Results for each of the special cases are shown and compared to commercially available full-wave solvers of CST and FEKO.