I have several simple models (3D primitives for the most part) that I need to have an "outline" on. Basically just lines that connect the outer most vertices together. I have A8 free so shaders are not an option, hence the problem. I am almost 100 percent sure I could just use the draw3dline (sorry, I don't remember the exact function) command to connect the vertices but that will require hard programming the individual vertex numbers in an array in order so I could read them ad connect them. Again it's possible, but it doesn't seem sensible. Any hints or ideas that might be a better approach?

You can do this in a modeling program: Duplicate your model, scale it a little (by normals, which is not possible in MED), invert the normals and apply a black skin. Now render both entities at the same time and position (you can scale the black model depending on object-camera distance to keep the outline at the same thickness).

I did this before, only I scaled it using MED which then ran into problems as you said. I just downloaded Blender to try this, imported the model, selected scale and changed to normals, set it to about 1.5 just to see the result, exported it and merged with original model in MED to see the size, and the imported model is half of it's original size. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

While we're at this, can anyone post a sample code for how to do that with shaders for those of us using the commercial version?

^^ You can find what you are looking for in the wiki

I don't know anything about Blender but try to duplicate the model, scale only the new one and keep the old one as a reference.

I should really work on a plugin (which can be used with LoadLibrary too) so you can use shaders on the free version :S

@Superku - That's exactly what I'm doing. It seems no matter how big I scale the new inverted one, when I export it from blender and import it back to MED and merge with the original to check sizes, the new one is always about half of the size, even if I scale it to 50 times larger in blender.

@Ch40zzC0d3r - Yeah, you really should. What are you waiting for?? hahaha just kidding with you. I'd have no clue where to even begin with that

What I tried so say was the following: Take a cylinder for example. Now create a copy of the object in Blender so you have two cylinders in one file. Try to only scale one of them and keep the other object/ mesh unchanged. That should help.

@superku, you have to flip normals on the outer one and scale it along the normal afaik