I agree with Mathias. I am new to the modelling community as well and havent done anything really so far. A little trying on aircraft fuselage shapes here and there, but I want to know the fundamentals of a program like Gmax/Max first. That makes you much more efficient in the end and you know what and why you do it. Therefore I concentrate on making basic and medium complexity stuff, learning the interface etc.
If you are into video training I can make the following suggestion:
http://www.3dbuzz.com/xcart/product.php?productid=38&cat=10&page=1
I friend of mine is doing Maya and used these training courses and gave me a hint. I ordered myself the 3ds Max Fundamentals series for $99.00 and it is absolutely worth the money. Well these $99.00 is really nothing compared to the awesome training you will get. You will start with the interface basics, then move to simple models first, going all the way up. You even do am F-14 Tomcat, so there will be aircraft modelling in this course as well and it is sooo cool. I am almost there, to start on it.
Keep in mind though, that these training videos are based on 3ds Max 9, I think, but you can transfer a lot to Gmax. Most of the things are very similar and you can directly use it in Gmax. 3ds Max might have more complex functionality, but you dont need that really to model a good aircraft from what I have seen. There are also a lot of training videos on animations, texture baking, texturing with Photoshop etc. So very nice content. All in all you get like 105 hours of video training. Have a look at the sample videos, in order to check if you like the teaching style.
I was lucky to get a student license of 3ds Max 2009, so I can directly work on the things presented in the course. I might get lucky and get a commercial version after it, but if not, I will go back to Gmax and I know that the transfer back will be no problem at all.
Its up to you and you learning style, but I just wanted to tell you what I am currently doing in order to learn a complex application like Gmax/Max and these videos are helping me a lot. When you then read awesome tutorials like Milton's C162, it all makes much more sense, if you know the basics and the tools.
Hope I could provide a little help. From newbie to newbie
