THe easiest part can go first. The exhaust pipes. By using inset initially to get the required inner polygon base, and chamfering one of the vertices to make the two sides equal in number, I used scale and move to situate the vertices in a polygon.

I then extruded these polygons to make the first cylinder, beveled the next set to make the outward cone and then beveled it once more at a higher length and smaller increase in size to get the main pipe area. Making sure the scale was correct on the exhaust by using scale (they were a bit thin initially so I beefed them up a bit) I could then select the polygons at the top (or vertices or edges, up to you) and rotate the upper exhaust to where it is now.

As the Ying Yang symbol on his back may be put to good use later on (I'd like it to rotate at certain times) I will be making it a seperate element. To do this easily I will simply make a very low poly hemisphere and take away the inner side.

I also added some detail with the 'ribs' of the pack. Extra detail is always good, I could do this with texturing perhaps, but once again I have reason to put them in there that will look a lot better as they are now, rather than just a texture.

I could throw some cables in now to prepare for the arm but I might put the arm on first so I know they can tie in together properly. And anyway, I've been wanting to rip my arm off for the past section or so.

Alt-x the torso so you can see through it and then deselect the torso section. Select the main character and then the poly selection tool. Start by selecting the arm that you CAN see, and then into the areas that are under the torso. Be sure to take away as many as you can, even if you have to edit it a little so that if an area is mostly overlapped, you tweak it so that it is all overlapped and you can then get rid of that poly. Remember that every poly counts.

Leave the area around the other arm shoulder though as it will need the polys in order to flex still.

Pretty cool huh? We're now back down to 2743 polygons. Giving me approximately 757 polys to play with for the arm and possibly anything else I care to add.

And if I hear any bad jokes about being 'armless I'll have to come over there and beat you to a bloody pulp. Now, to continue...

This is the shoulder joint. Built by a number of methods.

Firstly I created a sphere with 10 segments. This gave me a good start for a sphere I could chop up to suit the joint.

Next I converted the sphere into a editable poly, and selected the outer two rows of polygons, detached them to the element, and moved them away from the middle section far enough that I could get into the inside without anything getting in the way.

As these parts will be rotating (hopefully) they needed to be capped. I used manual methods to do it (Polygon | Create ) but I should have used the cap tool under the Border sub-selection panel. This does what it sounds, it caps the area that the border surrounds in one easy step. I did this to each empty border.

After that I then selected the polygoin facing the shoulder and extruded it. As very little of it will be see I kept it at only four polys, but I added a smoothing group to it to imply it isn't a box nevertheless.

Finally I added a 6 sided cylinder (with no height values, be sure to take them out) and deleted the end polys. This is to act as the inner rotation element.

Unfortunately I don't know if this is even needed, I would LIKE it to be as it would look quite impressive but I will only find out once I rig it, and put it down to experience after I sort it out. The issue is going to be whether or not I can make it rotate on each main elements axis, rather than blend it. Should be interesting to see.

The Shoulder plate was a pain. 2D sketches can always lead to this sort of difficulty when coming to terms with actual space, rather than what I want cos' it looks cool space. Here I had to play around a fair bit in order to make the plate work, without any (well at least too much) clipping. Hence the area at the back needing to be a different width than the rest.

For this to function correctly it would need to move at least a little bit in order for the arm to have full functionality. Weaver is also an agile character (of sorts) so he needs to have that leeway. The best way to do this, I figured, was to add some pivot points at the edge allowing the plate to rotate up and down. You can see these in the light blue.

There are other ways I have in mind, but for this exercise I think this will do. Reminds me of a gridiron player, which is also cool :)

But this part was cool fun :)

Firstly I rotated the shoulder plate so that it was side on to make it easier. Then I either used the polygon | inset tool to make a polygon in the middle of the main polygons I needed a canister to come out of or used Edge | Insert Vertex to place a vertex along the edge in order to chamfer it (I had to Polygon | Create the polys individually around it to make a whole new poly however) in order to make the base polygon to build the canisters on.

This took a little bit of fiddling around. Firstly all of the canisters needed to be equal in edges, and 6 edges at that. I lined the vertices up using the scale tool (selection pivot selected) and manually lining the vertices up with the edges of the plate that were already there. Then I had to make them more of a circle, as some of them were scaled along one direction more. To do this I selected the vertices of one canister base and then applied a Spherify modifier to it. This makes the selected vertices in a rounded array.

Once the base polys were made I was able to select them and extrude them all at once. After extrusion I applied a Polygon | Inset and another extrusion for the main area of the canister. For the top I applied a bevel, moving it first to get the height, only to make the height 0 (visually or by using the tool input window is up to you) and then move the width out. After that I applied one more extrusion to finish off the main canister.

But wait! There's more!

If you look closely you can see that I have added a cylinder within a cylinder. This is because I plan on using an opacity map to make it look like there is liquid in the canisters. Pressing Ctrl-x to ghost the object, I selected the main area of the canister (that would be the glass) and scaled it down by all 3 axis. Working on each canister individually, I moved the 'bottom' vertices of each inner cylinder to overlap the plate a little.

To get the finishing touch and make it look more interesting I cut the top of the inner cylinder so it lookes like each canister is a little empty. I selected the inner polys (once again working on each one individually) and used the Quick Slice tool in the polygon modifier panel under the Edit Geometry rollout. Simply select the polys you want to cut, click once for the first point of the cut and a second time when you have defined the plane where you want to cut. It works on the screen axis, so be careful what you have selected and where you cut. As my plate was straight again I had no problems in cutting where I wanted (with water being flat etc.). Once the inner cylinders were cut, I capped them (the top, not the bottom) and Voila! Cool mana canisters :)

The close up image (by clicking the small image to your right) has all four viewports if you wanted a more detailed look.

For the arm I'm actually designing straight in 3D, from another 2D sketch. I have my initial concept but it doesn't technically work, I have my side and front view and I've decided I don't like them anymore (although I'm taking elements from both) and I've basically gone back to the drawing board. I know how I want the joints to work, I just have to make them look good.

The bottom arm concept has some promise, so I'm going to give that a go.

And here's the start of it.

THe pipes in the bicep area were created using a cylinder with a number of height segments, extruding the end segments by local normal (and adjusting the end vertices to straighten them up) and then moving the vertices around to suit the joining to the other parts, and the curve of the pipe.

The elbow area was built using extrude, bevel and your basic vertex and edge tools.

The cog elements were made using Inset on the cylinders polygons (By polygon) and then the inset poly was then given a Bevel. The polys on the original cylinder were then given a smoothing group to match what it originally had.

The elbow cover was created using a low poly sphere initially. Lowering the count to where the width of each segment was suitable to my needs. I then turned it into an Editable Poly, selected each segment, or row, and detached it. Leaving three seperate sections that could rotate as the arm moved. By scaling down, and tweaking the polys and vertices I was able to make the pad you see here.

Another tool I used during this process was the ability to move the pivot of your object. (Making rotating around the middle easier. In the Hierarchy tab ( ) next to the modify tab you will see Adjust Pivot section. Select Affect Pivot Only, and you then have the ability to move and rotate the pivot of your object. Also handy to note is the Centre to Object in the Alignment section which does exactly that.

And the end result for the bicep looks like this. Just for interests sake as it looks like a rather poly heavy area, I turned all my models into Editable Meshes and checked the count. It was up to 3880!

So looking at my model, I had to figure out how to cut down the polys, without losing too much of the detail. I took out a lot of the detail in the pipes basically, with the odd poly here and there taken out if I could find it. I got it down to 3680 Polygons. THis is still way above what I would like it to be. Especially seeing as I still need to add the forearm and fingers. Which is going to take up a lot of polygons themselves.

However, I have decided to leave it for now and design the rest of the arm and see if it's all going to actually work. If it does, I'll try very hard to make it work, if not...I already have another idea for how the arm is to look.

Here is most of the forearm. Simple to make in comparison to half the stuff so far. A cylinder converted to poly and scaled vertices to make the base shape.I also moved them at the base to suit the hinge joint cylinder.

The canisters are copied from the shoulder plate and scaled down along two axis to make them thinner...and then duplicated around the forearm.

The hand is the same as the normal hand basically. Grabbing edges and shift / Moving them.

Where the wrist and the forearm overlap I actually made the forearm a solid and had the wrist go into the forearm to save on polys. I have used this elsewhere in the model so you should know what I mean.

OK, so we have a finished model...nearly. THe poly count is 4014. roughly 500 over what I would like as a maximum. So we are going to have to really delve into this thing and clean up some polys.

How am I going to get rid of 500 polys you ask? I have no idea :) But I'm determined to get this very model into the game as I'm pretty happy with the results.

So here we go onto the final round!