Mik:
1. Make a low-poly, angular canopy shape. One polygon per panel.
2a. Empty the polygons, leaving the outer lines intact and selected.
2b. Copy/paste each of these line sets individually in their place, then shrink the new ones down a little, so they're inside the old polygon (steps 2a and b are interchangable, I've found it easier to manipulate copied polygons sometimes)
3. Loft the old polymesh's emptied polygons, and their copied smaller versions. Extrude the results, or use an add thickness function if you've got one (I do, and it saves an extra ten or so minutes of work). Alternately, copy the resulting flat polymesh, shrink it, and loft that to the original, much the same as the first one.
Kinda difficult in the explaining, utterly simple in the doing. I've framed a whole hemisphere of some 30 polys before using this method.
Lemme know if you need pictures to show what I'm talking about.
KMN: I like it. Particularly the nose- most of the rest is pretty standard space-fighter fare, but that gives it a new look.
