Robot start and modeling troubles

This week I started on my 3D modeling (it's been a while so i'm proper rusty). I started modeling the robot, I started with the head. I modeled the head as a single mesh and the buttons on top as secondary mesh. I'm trying to keep the poly count optimal as I will be using most of my count on my character mesh.

Robot head with topology, just to show the optimization.

With the body of the character I started with a cube as his a pretty angular guy, I added half of a sphere as a pivot point for my characters head to move. I also want him to have some compartments on the front of him to store things, so I set the topology in a way that I can add the small details in later. I also added the hinges in to add a bit more visual detail to the low poly model.

The body of the robot with topology relevant to where surface detail will be.

I had a lot of trouble with the jet engine, as I started by creating one segment of the engine by creating a plane and using the "array" tool to duplicate the plane around a pivot point in space to create a realistic engine look. I got some help on how to use "array" from Dan Sonely over facebook as I had followed a few tutorials to no avail. I also had problems zooming through my turnarounds so I could edit the other sides of my model, I resolved this with the advice of Andrew Findley, Helly Furrevik and David Archbold. By using a combination of turning "backface cull" on, and "Isolating" my object and "hiding" others.

Using the array tool to duplicate my plane.

As you can see it doesn't look to bad aside from the gaps in the mesh, but when I turned my view port from "shaded" to "realistic" you couldn't really see any surface detail from distance, there for rendering the mesh pointless as you can see here.

I resolved this problem by re-creating the jet engine with some advice from Peter Orton,Paul Abley and Adam Felgate. They gave me the idea of using a cylinder and tapering the bottom in and adding a "twist" modifier. I did this and extruded the edge loops inwards do give some surface detail, I also extruded the bottom inwards and then the center of the bottom outwards to create a turbine look.

I had a few issues when I extruded the edge loops for the visual detail of the turbine, as there were loose vertices that created ngons in my model so I had to go in and weld them together. But other than that this technique worked better.

I learn't how to do the the soft realistic lighting off of Neil Goodman, as my screenshots wouldn't of looked half as good without the little tip of putting in a "skylight" and turning on "illuminate with scene lights" from the "lighting and shadows" sub-menu.