I’ve been using Maya professionally as a programmer for several years now, but am newish to the art side of things.

I’ve spent a couple of days modeling a humanoid character that is symmetric about the YZ plane.  I used the trick where you start with a cube, delete one half of it and then create another instance of it with a scale of -1.  I got it to a point where I was happy with it.  I merged the two halves into a single model, merged the common vertices and smoothed the normals.

Today I spent several hours mapping out the UVs.  Mostly I used planar and cylindrical projections on groups of faces, and then hand tweaked them in the UV editor.

Next I tried creating eyeballs and adding them to my character.  Immediately I noticed that my eye sockets were too warped for my eyeballs.  I’d like to edit my mesh to make the eye sockets fit.  However, if I delete half my mesh and do the reflect trick again, I’m going to loose all that UV data that I created.

Is there any way for me to edit my mesh symmetrically without having to redo all the UVs?

The select, move and other tools have an option called reflection. If you select the tool options and check that box, you can pick an axis (the default is what I think you want, across X) and then if you go to vertex mode (or others) when you choose a vertex, it picks two.

Switch to the move tool, and if you move the selected vertex toward the center of the model, the other vertex moves toward the center also, like a reflection.

I do not have Maya 8, but I do have 7.0, and it does not have selection reflection, but it does have move reflection like I described, although I only tested that by moving vertices on a simple sphere. The other results were done in Maya 2012 on a character mesh (built following pretty much the same method you used). So the basic capability to tweak both sides the same has been there for a long time, although it has definitely evolved in later versions.

Hopefully, this will help you get that head tweaked for your eyeballs. You owe me a picture when you get done. :)

<* Wes *>

The edge loop tool does not have a symmetry feature, but generally, inserting a few loops around the mouth should come out symmetrical anyway. The tool does have a choice of relative distance from edge and exact distance from edge.

Anyway, thanks for the pic. I like cartoon characters, and that one looks good.

<* Wes *>

P.S. I hate going back to Maya 2009 and before, it looks so bland since I have gotten used to the 2011/2012 Qt-style interface. I just keep them around for testing a script on older versions.