thanks for your reply.

Erm.. at one point you switch over to a tab named MJpolytools (a quick google tells me this is a collection of scripts for various processes - trouble is all the links i'm finding for it are dead).

You used one that creates an edge loop at central point of a selected edge (this is handy because in maya 2009 the only default options are cut faces tool which does something similar but you have to select the entire face loop for which to cut along first)

Another thing was cleaning up script based history. If you have the MJpolytools handy that would be good. At the moment i've been able to replicate everything comfortably but having a look at those scripts cant hurt. judging by your toolbar, i'm guessing you used to using a lot of custom scripts to speed up your workflow.

Well, those other tuts I referred weren't specifically game related i don't think...i'm saying this because there was smoothing applied, which because of the triangles resulted in quite a few pinches and glitchy areas were its not subdividing properly. I've only been using maya for 6 months so i'm fairly new to all this stuff...but as I understand it in games work there's no smooth applied, instead softening/hardening face/edge normals to varying degrees to give surfaces smooth like appearance. Is this true?

I probably want to end up in vfx/post...so detailed modeling techniques like this is what i'm interested in for the moment.

-P