Thanks. That helps with the texture switching based on the normals. But there should be a way to make the single layer of polygons appear to be thicker -- almost extruded. Displacement really doesn't do it. Dynamic cloth never looks realistic at the edges because real cloth has a thickness but polygons don't.

May be someone has already suggested this but: Could we also have some way to group objects in a scene such that the materials can be added to the parent group and all children in the scene inherit the materials of the parent? Children that have materials set in a group override the parent. I think this would be useful for multi-prop scenes that are made up of modular architecture such as PICK. For instance, you could make a group called LivingRoom and add in several floor and wall props that tile together to make the room shape you're looking for. As soon as those props are grouped, the group parent has the same materials as all of the unique geometry in the group. Then when you set the material for the floor geometry in the parent, all of the floor props in that group have the same materials set.