Hi Yomega,
To mirror geometry in Maya, you just model one half & Duplicate it over then combine it.
To do this:
Make sure all the verts along the half’s center are all aligned and the center is snapped to this edge of the half (the center of the whole model).
To do this hold ‘D’ while in transform mode (‘w’) and while holding D hold the V key to snap the center to a vert that lies on the half’s edge.
Then duplicate the geometry and scale it to -1 in x or z, whichever one places it to the other half of the model.
If you want see both sides of the mesh while you model, and see changes made to one side automatically update on the other side, you need to take half a base mesh. This time do a Duplicate with Options and check the instance box. Just like step 1 above scale the instanced duplicate to the -1 in x or z.
Now when you sculpt on the first half, the second half will be doing the same thing, so you can see your model in full as you sculpt.
Then when you are done modeling, you just delete the instanced side and do step 1.
When you are finished and have both halves,
Take the duplicated half that is scaled to the -1, freeze its transforms, reverse the normals, then delete the history. Take both halves and Mesh > Combine. Then select all your mesh's verts, and go to Edit Mesh > Merge with Options. We now need to merge all the verts along the two halves, since we aligned the half's edge before the duplication all the verts we need to merge lie right on top of each other, so make the merge distance variable in the merge options really small, like 0.0001 and apply.
Now you can smooth normals if needed. And Delete History
This was how I've always been shown. Hope it helps!
- Bergquist
