This tut uses Blender, but most if not all of the principles involved should apply to Max, Maya, Lightwave, etc.
For Max users, I'm going to put the equivalent Max steps in red (when I know them).
The purpose of this tut is to demonstrate a few different approaches to adding armor plating and/or panel lines to your spaceship meshes. I'm going for basic concepts here, not fine application, so the end result of this tut won't be as pretty as the results that you
can get with these techniques, if you take some time in applying them.
This is what I wound up with after less than two hours of work. Nothing fancy at all, but you can see the potential.
You can see in these shots that I've started with just a basic cube, and done some scaling and extruding to make a shape that's at least somewhat interesting to look at. Very low-poly to start, which is good, because the plates and panel lines add a lot by the time a model is done.
Here I've made a loop cut (CTRL-R) across the length of the model, in order to divide it into two sections. I'll be using different methods on the two sections. I then selected one of the larger faces of the front section, copied it (SHIFT-D), and moved it away along the X axis (G,X). Moving your parts in only one axis makes it very easy to re-align them when the time comes.
Max: you can either use the slice plane and put a vertical slice across the middle, use quickslice for the same vertical slice, or select all of the lengthwise (horizontal) edges and connect them. To make the separated face, you can just select the face and clone it as an object. Do the same constrained move using the axis handles on the gizmo.
Now to make this into detail panels: using the loop cut tool (CTRL-R), I made a series of vertical and horizontal cuts (relative to the face normal), always making two cuts on the same axis at a time, close together. This will create the gaps between the panel faces. After I have the cuts finished, I select the thin rows of faces, making a pattern that looks pleasing to the eye. Once all of the thin faces that I want are selected, I delete them.
Max: Actually, this is simpler in Max, as you don't have to make paired cuts. Cut out the edges you want, and then chamfer them by a small amount (say .2, or even .05, depending on the scale of the model). Use the numeric input (that little box on the side of the chamfer button) for precise control.
NOTE: You may not have done this yet, so now's a good time to separate out these panel faces from the original model. Select all of the faces, then hit "P" to separate them. Save before you do it, because there's no undoing the separation.
Now extrude all of the faces, but not by very much (unless you want really thick plates - it's all artist's discretion, of course). After extruding, go back into Object Mode (TAB), and move the plates back along the X axis to line up with the ship's hull.
This render shows the result from just these few steps. I haven't done anything fancy with lights or materials, just a two-spot rig with the key light to the side of the model, tinted slightly orange/yellow and the fill to the front, set at half the intensity of the key and tinted slightly purple (complementary colors). I also enabled raytraced shadows on the lights, and turned on ambient occlusion with about 5 samples. This isn't a rendering tut as such, so what I'm doing is very quick and dirty.
Now, one thing you can do to improve the overall quality of the detailing is to add a slight bevel to the edges of the plates. My method is not the quickest, because Blender supposedly has a working bevel now, but I can't get it to run, so this is manual.
Select all of the "top" faces of the plates, and extrude them once again a very small amount. Now scale the new faces in a bit to create an angled edge. I did this by selecting all of the lines running along one axis, on one side, and shifting them slightly together, i.e. I picked all of the vertical lines on the left side of a face and moved them a bit to the right along the Y axis, then picked the ones on the right and moved them to the left along Y, repeated and rinsed with the ones on the top and bottom. The result of the beveling can be seen below:
Max: Again, much simpler in Max. Instead of extruding, then doing a second extrude and scaling the faces, simply do a bevel. Use the numeric input, and do a nice, small bevel like, say, .3 for height, -.2 for inset amount. You could also extrude, convert the face selection to edges, then chamfer the edges by a small amount. The bevel should work faster, i.e. fewer steps.
Now for the second method:
This time I selected one of the large faces from the back half of the ship. Lining up the camera along the side (Num-3, hit 5 to make it orthagonal), I once again used the face loop tool (CTRL-R) to make a series of paired vertical cuts. Once I had the vertical sections, I selected a given wide face and made horizontal cuts across it with the Knife Tool (k-knife exact). The knife only cuts the selected face, so you can cut each wide strip however you want and it won't distort the shape of the adjacent wide strips. The thin gap panels will have their triangulation shot to hades, but that doesn't matter because they won't be extruded and the triangles are too small to cause distortions in a render. Continue making these cuts until you have a pattern you like, then select all of the large faces and extrude them together a small amount. To repeat the bevel trick from above, do a second group extrude, and then scale the faces in (do it manually, because a group scale will create a virtual center towards which all of the faces will move - yuck!).
Max: A couple of methods will work here. Again, for the verticals you can use the slice plane, or the quick slice, or select the horizontal edges and connect them. Quickslice is, well, the quickest (duh!). For the horizontal cuts, you can use the cut tool and just go vertical edge to vertical edge, you can use the quickslice, or you can connect the vertical edges. You can also use the slice plane, with only certain faces selected (only those faces will be cut). You will very likely have to neaten up your lines by moving the vertices along their respective edges, to maintain 90 degree corners (if that's what you want). Again, instead of an extrusion followed by a manual scale, all you have to do in Max is use the bevel tool, with numeric input for fine control.
Here's the result, after beveling:
Last technique, this time to get embedded panel lines instead of extruded panel faces.
This time I selected the front faces, duplicated them (SHIFT-D), moved them out along "y" (G,Y), and separated them from the mesh (P). Now, I goofed up a bit here, because I started making my cuts with the loop cut tool (CTRL-R) before I realized I needed to set up for symmetry. So I went back and cut the faces in half, deleting one side (just line your view up directly in front of the face, activate loop cut along the vertical axis and line it up to where the line is totally straight - that's dead center on angled symmetrical faces like these). I also realized, after the fact, that this trick needs a solid block to cut into, so I extruded all of the faces back towards the ship a bit.
As you can see, I made the same pairs of cuts that I used on the other panels. And, once again, I selected the thin faces in a pattern I liked. This time, however, I didn't delete them, I extruded them together back into the body of the hull section. In effect, I etched panel lines into the hull section. Because I went to the edges of the front face, I wound up with some extra faces that had to be deleted at the corners. Two faces at the end of each groove, actually. Once these were deleted, the faces I wanted, along the side, had to be replaced by selecting the four vertices and making them into a face (F). I didn't do any beveling this time. After the etching was done, I made an instanced duplicate (ALT-D), mirrored the duplicate in "X" from the front view (SPACE, Transform, Mirror X-Local) and lined it up next to the original. Voila! Perfect symmetry!
Max: Simply make the edge cuts you want, then select the edges and extrude them by a small amount into the hull, say -.2 for distance and .2 or smaller for the size. To do the symmetry trick you can either use the symmetry modifier (which I am still learning) or you can use the mirror tool to create an instanced copy that is mirrored in x (or whichever axis).
The final result was shown above, but here's one more look:
If you think this is pretty plain, you're right. The model below was detailed using nothing but the basic techniques discussed in this tutorial:
Poly count is extreme, roughly 700k to 1.6mil faces depending on Sub-d settings, but I think it's worth the render time. And Blender is efficient enough to manipulate a model this detailed with no major hassles....try that in Max!
Max: if you get poly counts this high, use adaptive degredation ("O" key) to speed up the viewport. This particular model has a lot of different pieces, if I were doing it in Max I would probably use Xrefs of the pieces that weren't being modeled at the time, to speed things up further
I hope you found this useful and informative. Enjoy, and Happy Blending!
Or whatever verb one applies to using Max: Maxing, maybe? 
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nice tutorial by the way looks pretty nice gonna try it tomorrow
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