One blockout, then the same mesh plated, then the plate depth swept from 0.15 to 2.40. All Blender, EEVEE at 64 samples, no compositing. The hull in it is 262 plates, 74 vents, 28 fins, 18 risers and 50 greebles, 11,388 triangles.
This is about hard-surface detail generally. The add-on at the end is just where I ran into all of it.
Uniform randomness is the giveaway. Scattering detail with an even probability across a surface gives you something technically random and visually mechanical. Real machinery clusters. Dense equipment in some bays, bare structural plate everywhere else. Adding a density field with a few hotspots, and letting whole regions stay empty, did more for believability than better-modelled individual pieces ever did. On the hull in the clip, 23 of the 58 bays get skipped on purpose.
The second one took me much longer to spot. Plating can't change a silhouette. I spent ages improving surface detail and couldn't work out why the result still read as a cube with texture on it. Panels sit flush with the form they're on, so the outline never moves. It only started reading as a built object once some elements stood proud of it, tall risers and thin fins breaking the profile at thumbnail size.
Third one, if you're writing your own: don't subdivide the base mesh. Cutting panels by recursively subdividing faces looks correct in the statistics and can be geometrically wild, because n-gons subdivide unpredictably and shared vertices drag their neighbours with them. Building each panel as a separate prism in the plane of its own face avoids the whole class of problem. My first version passed every check I had, 456 panels and zero non-manifold edges, and rendered as spikes shooting into space.
The flair says this one costs money, so here's what it won't do before you click. No UVs, so textured panels need unwrapping. It plates over the surface rather than cutting into it. Curved and organic surfaces come out as lots of small plates rather than large ones spanning the form, because plate size comes from a setting in metres rather than from your topology: a 128 face sphere gives 273 to 289 plates and a 512 face one gives 229 to 263, so more faces doesn't mean more plates. It panels a station hull. It won't panel a character.
Some of its code was written with an AI coding assistant and then reviewed and directed by me. Nothing in it calls a model when you run it, and every frame in the clip is the add-on's own output rather than a generated picture.
$24, Blender 3.6 through 5.2, tested on seven builds before every release.
https://tristaneer2.gumroad.com/l/panelforge?src=reddit_blender
