I am working on an outfit for V4, problem I am having is the outfit looks too flat and want to make it look thicker. Here are some sample images can some one please help. Modeling software I have is 3d max , Hexagon and Pegasus Modeler.
Here are some examples of what I have done. The last image is sort of what I am looking at but not as thick. Tried doing that to the arms and legs but they  "bloated" when I shelled them in Max.

Did they appear bloated in Max , or in Poser. Turn off smoothing in Poser and see if that makes a difference , or try unweld vertices at the ends of cylinder shapes. Poser smoothing will bulge oue cylinders .

Shell is the way to go for thickness, or you can extend only the edges and turn them under to reduce polygon count.

Quote - Did they appear bloated in Max , or in Poser. Turn off smoothing in Poser and see if that makes a difference , or try unweld vertices at the ends of cylinder shapes. Poser smoothing will bulge oue cylinders .

Shell is the way to go for thickness, or you can extend only the edges and turn them under to reduce polygon count.

Bloated in Max. I have welded and double checked it there are no stray vertices I can find. I will post some images if I get a chance tonight when I get home.

I ain't got max (no os x version), but I would use the "add thickness" command in carrara.
my guess would be about 0.1 inch.  if the thickness is small enuff, the surface doesn't lose
its original UVMapping.  maybe hex has "add thickness".

thats the shell command in max . I believe that either the shell is too thick , or there may be a setting about following normals thats not quite right . I use mainly lightwave and there are several ways of thickening an object that give slightly different results .

I just want to give the some of the part a little more thickness. I am redoing the legs to include some sort of kneepads and I have started redoing the arms cause I found something wrong with them in the elbow area.

maybe ya can thicken some areas by using displacement maps.
in case nobody mentioned that yet.

Quote - maybe ya can thicken some areas by using displacement maps.
in case nobody mentioned that yet.

Not too sure how to use Displacement maps
That might be the way to go, I am also redoing the arms and legs part cause I ain't too happy with the way they look.

I have none of those 3 apps in msg 1 above, but if they're like all the other 3d apps
(poser, carrara, cheetah et al.), they've got shader trees in which one of the channels
is displacement, into which one attaches a jpeg greyscale image.  white is a bump,
black is a dent (YMMV).  just paint it as if it were a texture map, using UV template
generated by one of yer apps (or uvmapper).  do not use poser bump channel.

I finally did thicken the obj files a little, still not happy with the way it looked, except for the chest. I also looked at adding some displacement maps did not get to far there.  I am redoing some of the modeling hip. I could not get to it this weekend due to rebuilding my website.