Adding thickness at render time?

[Patrick_Coan]

Is there a way to add thickness to 1-sided geometry at render time? Especially for clothing, rather than modeling the back side of something fairly complex like a folded collar. I'd like to add the thickness after the rigged 1-sided mesh has been skinned, and adjust the thickness as needed. Much like the Shell modifier in 3ds Max. I haven't come across a catch all solution in Maya for geometry, but figure that it could be a simple approach at render time. Unless I am mistaken, displacement can't address this. While there is a round corner option in the VrayMTL shader, it still needs edges to work with.

Any ideas? Otherwise, will need to burden the modeling and rigging stages, when a simple edge at render time is all that is needed.

Thanks!

Apologies if this has already been discussed, I wasn't able to find what I'm looking for.

[SonyBoy]

Is there a reason a simple extrude wouldn't give you that?

[flat]

tiled the BOX with VRayEmmesh.

[Patrick_Coan]

Thanks flat is that literally "VRayEmmesh", I haven't heard about that feature before. It looks like you are using Max, correct? OK, looks like Maya has Enmesh as well, interesting approach - but for clothing, I don't think it will work - unless I were to somehow instantiate at the thread level, or making chainmail

SonyBoy Maybe you know more than I do, but I think a simple extrude wont work because the geometry is not so simple. Imagine a buttoned collar shirt, a simple extrude creates all sorts of intersecting geo and would need to be handled differently with parts of the garment if the extrude would appear even and consistent. I might try further extrude operations but so far, its messy and unreleable, especially for rigged and simmed cloth. UVW issues as well/

[SonyBoy]

Yes, extrude can create all of the problems you're talking about, so it really depends on the topology and complexity of the original mesh. Just a suggestion. I've had no problem using this technique on simple cloth sims in the past though, FWIW. Of course the cloth sim is upstream from the extrude. Likewise any extrusions that are applied downstream from any rigging or skinning should inherit all the deformations of the original mesh without issue. Interpenetration is usually the main problem.