hi, iv been working on this for the past hour or so an decided to post my efforts.
this is an APU from the matrix, if you dont know what that is (where were you when the film came out?) it stands for Armoured Personal Unit.
its going to be a very high poly model, already at over 9,000 tris! :o
c+c please.
sorry for the big pics
everything looks to be progressing smoothly so far. Keep up the good work!
Maybe you should select auto-smooth instead of smoothing everything. My experience is that mechanics look better that way…but I could be wrong
Yeah do what litterate said or just put it on solid for now. Sadly blender doesnt have smoothing groups yet and you cant smooth things properly…It is looking verylow poly right now is it for a game or something? Dont know if you have seen these on cgtalk or 3dtotal but they are awsome there. Check them out for ideas on details cuz this needs alot still 
But its probably stlil early so i will watch and see it come together!
ok, thanks for the replies, first of all, what is auto-smooth? iv never heard of it.
no it isnt going to be for a game, then again maybe… probably not though because it would be murder to rig(im not very good at rigging) 
about it being low-poly, im going to get all the basic shapes continuing with the level of detail on the legs, then go back and detail the entire thing. any crits?
heres an update, all iv done is join the legs and start the main body.
Good work, but I have some crits.
The recent addition seems, IMHO, to be quite blocky, and looks like it has a normals problem.
Regarding selective smoothing, just select the faces you want to be solid in edit mode and press set solid - this would help on some of those cylinders. The new part seems quite blocky, and it is low poly - 9000 faces is not a lot, my current main WIP has around 20000 faces - but I am probably not an expert at reducing poly count.
Also, the legs you have seem rather skinny, have you got any references? I found one of a toy APU, it has wires crawling all over the rather thick legs.
Here is the picture I found, (cropped to remove white space, used without permission):
Sorry if you already have good references.
Apart from that, you are doing well on a detailed and ambitious project.
id cut back on the subserfacing mechanical eqwipment like this would propably have edges and not a lot of curvs nice work though man keep it up.
Autosmooth is in the edit buttons window(F9) it’s a toggle button, lets you set an angle to break up the smooth effect. FYI it only shows up at render time, so when you’re modeling it’ll look solid till you render it.
Blender’s smooth seems to work fine as long as you don’t try to smooth sharp angles. Still it could be better.
thanks for crits, im going to thinken up the legs and add more wires after iv finished the the first draft of the apu. iv put auto smooth on as you said and started to model up the chest. im now going to do the chair, i’ll probably post the chair in a couple of hours.
z-axis, thanks for the image, FYI the references im using is a short anim from the official Matrix site, produced in Maya, some pics form other 3d sites like 3d total, and also now going to be using that pic of the toy youve posted, thanks.
anyway, heres the update.
