Yeah, start with a cube. Shift-tab turns the smoothing on and off, switch between the two modes to edit and preview. Setting edges to "hard" allows you te get sharp curves that do not look all globby. A big tendency for new modelers is to oversmooth and to smooth everything. The fewer polygons you have, the easier your model will be to manipulate, do not smooth until the very end. (And I'm talking about actualy smoothing, not the shift-tab smoothing.) Keep your polygons uniform and try to keep a well defined structure. FYI the way you get holes is to select both side faces of something, inset, and use the "bridge" function. This took me a long time to learn so I thought I'd give ya a heads up. Here is a table model I am working on: http://www.3dfightclub.com/~madmax/uploads/files/table.zip It uses hard edges well and is a very "clean" mesh. Feel free to mess around with it. Here's a great site with tons of technical tutorials: http://www.geocities.com/paulthepuzzles/aardvarks.html