What I noticed a lot when people were adding panels to their excelsior models, or adding panels to a model in general, was that they would work their mesh to conform to the panel layout, then simply extrude polygons from the existing geometry:
If you are working with relatively high polygon counts it's not that apparent, if not the result will look like this though (exaggerated):
panels_1.jpg
Every panel's borders are facing in a slightly different direction, accounting for the faceted look.
Having the panel lines run in between of the base mesh's lines however moves the gap between the panels to a flat surface:
Now the borders of the panels will always have the same orientation across the gaps, eliminating the extremely faceted look:
panels_2.jpg
Of course this will increase the polycount (about 40% than the first method) but it looks better than doubling the segments and doing it the first way, which would consume 50% more polygons than the second method.
So planning your model to not have lines where there should be panel borders will make it look better with less polygons
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