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 :)