This is my first project. At the moment it's taken me four days of work to get this far, where I've come upon a stumbling point.
The parts I've circled need to be perfectly flat. To get as far as I have so far, I booleaned the flat surface of a cube at the correct angle onto the top of the spires. Only now, I'm getting surface artifacting. If I try to smooth, mask and invert, etc, the artifacts still occur or it loses it's smooth, flat edge.
I'd like to appeal for some advice, as I'm very passionate about this piece. Or 'part' of this piece. I'd upload a sketchfab of it, but it's a bit....large. Pre-topo it is 3.5 million tris alone. Yeah. And it's just a part of the bigger piece.
Eventually, once all the parts are done I'll post it in all it's massively large poly-counted glory.
On this part, I particularly like the pieces in view. I tried to emulate welding marks along the central frame which I think came out pretty well.
I understand the piece isn't clear as to what it is, but it's the upper torso of a robot before parts are attached, similar to the frame of a car's body.
The community is a much a better place to ask these kinds of questions. You will get a lot more help much faster.
http://community.cgcookie.com/
FIGURED IT OUT. Not sure if this is 'orthodox' but because the boolean left a single solid face on the top, that's where the artifacting was coming from. Instead of leaving it as it was I instead went into sculpt mode, picked up my smooth tool and turned it's strength down to .001 - not enough to deform, but by the action itself, it added geometry.