Heh. The shield effect I did was done using a direct light and using the projector aspect of that light. The shield texture was just an .avi I rendered before hand and projected it onto the hull. There is no physical mesh there for the shield.
could do, but with the mesh I can make it glow without actually
emmitting light.
also, using keyframes, I can loop the glow if there is more than one shot over that point. In fact, I'm timing the animation using a sound track as base. so no matter the amount of shots over a point, or how fast they move, or how hard they
seem to hit, I can handle the time of the glow at will, make it shorter, longer, make it flicker back and forth, vanish it, etc...
I just place the mesh and the material, add two keyframes at the endpoints of the impact sound, adjust the effect in the middle (fade, flicker, hold, whatever) and render.