Surface thickness shader

[sannyasi]

I'm in need of some help with maya. I'm trying to create a shader that would allow for control according to surface thickness.... This is a mental ray state shader built into xsi 6, and a gradient type in Lightwave since version 7. The math behind it would be cast a ray from the camera and calculate the floating point distance from the first face that is hit to the second, this could then be connected to other attributes for a number of effects... I have played around with the mib_ray_marcher since it seems a logical node for this, but I have had no success, and documentation/tutorials on the net are very lacking. I've also tried the parti volume and mib_volume nodes which work but seem extremely limited for control.

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks in advance.

[Pascal]

Hello,

You might want to try the Ray Length shader from binary alchemy. It's free and can be used to get the thickness of an object...
It there (http://www.binaryalchemy.de/index_dev.htm)
In the essential shader collection.

Pascal.