3D modeling: "shell" tool

[Tryptic]

This is more of a 3D modeling question, but it occurred to me recently that it would be very useful.

In Fleet Ops, the devs added a visual effect to the Scoutcube which has the surface be covered by little colored dots moving around on colored lines. It does this with an overlay SOD, which has to match the Scoutcube model (not hard since, well, it's a cube).

If you wanted to make this kind of effect for another ship, you would need a SOD with the same shape as that ship, or one that hovers slightly outside of the ship... Like a shell.

Is there a built-in tool in Blender, 3DSMax, or whatever program you guys use, that does this? Would it be possible to take any ship SOD and create a shell SOD for that ship, a set distance away from it on every side, and then slap an animated texture on that shell?

If this would be easy to do, I would love to get shells like this for every Borg ship in my mod, for starters. I've realized recently that TM has a problem with a lack of visual feedback, and if more ships glowed/animated when they were affected by things, it would be a huge quality of life increase for the players.

Does this sound right, from a modeling point of view? Is this something that can be easily done?

 

[kjc733]

I'm not a Blender user, but I use a similar technique in Maya for doing registries. No special tool required, just create a duplicate of the mesh and then offset it by a tiny distance. Apply a different texture to the duplicate and delete any polygons that are superfluous (i.e. any bits that overlap the original mesh or don't need the texture).
If the mesh is a simple shape (like a cube) just make the duplicate a tiny amount larger and delete the unnecessary polygons.