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.

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!