I am considering purchasing Solidworks Educational to solve a particular problem that I have been stuck on for a week now! I'm wondering if any experienced users out there can advise me.

I create 3d printed sculpture from 3d laser scans, made with a Polhemus scanner. As laser scans have no thickness, I have been using Rhino (OffsetMesh with Solidify) and Rapidform (Thicken) to create solids that can be printed.

I am working on some new work which involves making plaster molds from my 3d prints, for ceramic slipcasting. As plaster molds require draft, the 90 degree angles produced by the the regular offset/thicken commands in Rhino and Rapidform is not useful to me. I need to have a 20-45 degree angle at all my edges, so the offset surface needs to be larger at the back than it is in the front, and watertight all around.

Is Solidworks capable of offsetting and scaling a very high-polygon mesh *at the the same time*? Will the Shell command do this? I've been Googling and searching the support docs, but haven't been able to work out if it will do the job or not.

Thanks for any suggestions anybody might have!

Sophie