old_school
Did a 30 second Google search wrt Lightwave, didn't find much... What I did find was scant reference to thickness being evaluated from a "surface thickness gradient". No other info so I am assuming that you need to bake a map out by rendering which fires rays??? Assumption here...

Whatever...

The firing rays works very well to evaluate thickness and you don't have to resort to the VOP SOP approach as you do have to correct those "perfect" cases such as fingers where the tips can fire right up to the shoulder anyway, and VOPs this means recursing over neighbours which means point clouds, blah. Just use a couple Attribute Promotes and a smooth.

Done.

See the attached file.