In Adobe Illustrator and other vector design software there's a feature to offset paths, where it creates a second path offset from the original:
I would like to find the equivalent for a 3D object in blender. It would produce something like the outer orange cube in this screenshot, which I just created manually by scaling it - but for more complex geometries, they would appear to get "fatter".
Please note this is different from scaling. Picture a 3D letter "U" - the two uprights would get closer and closer together as the offset was bigger - vs. scaling where they remain the same distance apart.
I've tried some modifiers with no success. Skin appears to be for modifying just vertices, and when applied to an object with faces, Blender hangs for a moment before it produced a very weird result. Some others like mesh cache, remesh, and volume to mesh don't appear to be the right solution. How can this be done?

