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I have a shape and I want to offset or contour the edges as you can see in the image below. Is there any add-on to offset the edge or any other method?

shape with outlines

Here's the .blend file:

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atek
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    Your grease pencil lines aren't planar. Is this what you intend to do or do you just want to have concentric duplicates of the shape? This needs some clarification. – metaphor_set Nov 08 '16 at 19:08
  • yes i want concentric duplicates of the shape from small to big – atek Nov 09 '16 at 02:49

2 Answers2

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As a lazy solution which also needs some clearing work, use Offset Edges addon. See how to install addon to access its functionality.

First, for it to work properly, apply scale for the object (Ctrl+A > Scale) and remove doubles (W > Remove Doubles).

With that, run Ctrl+E > Offset Edges > Offset (or Extrude, depending on whether you want the extruded edges to be connected to original ones or not).
It won't work well in the corners because of big amount of vertices there. You might need to edit that by using e.g. Vertex Slide tool to grab vertices along the edges to get rid of distorted corners.

screenshot of mesh with offsetted edges

screenshot of mesh with cleaned corners

Repeat the same for yet one more concentric iteration.

This will be easier if you dissolve that big amount of vertices before using the addon with Limited Dissolve (not an option if those vertices are needed as details).

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Mr Zak
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AFAIK there's only one "easy" and reliable method to achieve concentric copies in Blender. Depending on what you want to do with the shapes, there's still a little work ahead. Basically we "abuse" the Solidifiy Modifier to get the desired result.

  1. Tab into Edit Mode, press W and select "Remove Doubles". Then extrude the shape on the Z-axis. The size doesn't matter, since we delete the upper loopcut later on, anyway.

    prepare base mesh

  2. Tab into Object Mode and with your object selected, go to "Properties - Modifiers" and add a Solidify Modifier. In the Modifier Settings, deselect "Fill Rim", then select "Even Thickness".

    add modifier

  3. The distance between the two sides is controlled by the Thickness. Adjust it and then apply the Modifier (don't worry about the overlapping edges, we have to fix them manually in the next step). Then Tab into Edit Mode and delete the two upper rims.

    adjust distance, apply Modifier and delete upper rims

  4. Now we have to fix the newly created shape by removing the overlapping edges (the following gif shows only one side due to the image size limit, but you'll get the picture).

    fixing the shape

  5. Depending on what you want to do with the shapes (filling the rims with faces?) you need to recreate the deleted vertices in order to get a decent copy (again, the gif shows only one side).

    add the missing vertices

  6. If you want to have a more even distribution of your vertices (this helps if you want to fill the rims with faces), you can fix that by using the Loop Tools add-on. Due to the shape of the object (and how accurate it should be), this should be done in several steps per rim.

    Select the straight parts of the rim, then hit W, select "LoopTools" and "Space". Repeat for the other parts. The curved part might work in one step. The difference on that part is most prominent.

    distribute vertices evenly

    Repeat this on both rims until all the vertices are distributed evenly.

  7. When you're done, repeat the whole process from Step 1 on the newly created outer rim to create a third one.

Here's a .blend file with three rims, vertices evenly distributed:

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