Well I'm back from Montreal and I miss it already.  It's a great city and I've made some good friends there over the years.  I had an awesome view from my hotel room as you can see...

as well as some excellent food...

..

Poutine  =  Fries + Melted Cheese + Gravy  =  Mmmm...  (I'm pretty sure I could actually feel my arteries clogging as I ate it)

Otherwise...  MIGS was pretty active this year. I don't have any numbers but it appeared to be well attended. Autodesk had several sessions in addition to the two that I presented. Mark Stevens (VP Autodesk Technology Group) hosted a very interesting panel discussion about "The Role of Middleware in Game Development" with Dave Fracchia (VP of Technology at Radical Entertainment), Martin Walker (CTO Artificial Mind and Movement) and Yanick Roy (Studio Director at BioWare). The big take away seemed to be that middleware has indeed become a very important part of game development but that it doesn't always necessarily save a company time or make the dev cycle any shorter, but more importantly middleware can allow a developer to refocus valuable cycles in other areas.  The consensus was that in addition to the direct implications, by freeing up resources, middleware can therefore actually indirectly help improve the game in many other ways.  Another common view was that it is and will continue to be very desirable to have tighter integration between middleware components and the authoring and content creation tools that developers have already built their pipelines around.

I also had the opportunity to spend a day at A2M (Artificial Mind and Movement) creators of the hit game Wet.  They are actually one of the largest independent game developers around with over 500 employees.  My friend David Lightbown (Art Tech Director) coordinated meetings with various artists and technical artist to discuss Maya.  I showed them some cool Maya stuff and, thanks to Sylvain Cote, I also got a sneak peak at some of the cool custom tools they've created in Maya.  He has really done some super cool stuff!  I'm always amazed to see the things that smart people like Sylvain do to rip Maya apart and put it back together.  I just wish I could bring the tools back with me and put them right into Maya proper, but sadly they are proprietary :(

So for my tip of the week I'm going to discuss some symmetrical modeling options in Maya as well as a bonusTool that I wrote a while back called MirrorInstanceMesh which can be used for mirroring polygon edits across a symmetrical object.  I've shown bits and pieces of some of this stuff in past posts for other topics but I figured I'd bring it all together into a single post.  OK... I won't blabber on any more I'll just cut to the chase.  Here's the movie...