This week saw a return to basics, getting back to grips with Maya after a 3 year affair with 3D Studio Max. While this most recent relationship had at often times been tumultuous, it did bear many great fruits and I hope as many of the hard-won battles as possible can be carried back to my first love, (first that is, after DPaint).

The first surprise I got was the ease with which I was able to fall back into the navigation controls, which are quite dissimilar to Max but became second nature after just an hour of trial and error, and the same muscle-memory familiarity came back with with a little basic parenting/un-parenting hierarchy manipulation.

The second and greater surprise was how much I was affected by an uncomfortable sense of deja-vu working with controls that reminded me of darker pre-BioWare times when I wasn’t supported by a sizeable and talented team of technical animators that could customise our workflow at my and the other animators’ every whim.

Despite all this though, the whole exercise was an incredibly refreshing change. Made all the more enjoyable by the test subject I had to play around with, the latest HD rendition of Eidos’s very own poster girl, making a day of trial-and-error a real pleasure with such a fine model.

With the upcoming rebirth of E3 tomorrow, I thought I’d throw an old video of E3 2005 I made following the event onto YouTube, summarising the experience for one of the Mass Effect weekly team meetings.

A lot of press has been circulating regarding a supposed relief shared throughout the industry that the event has been downsized to save on costs and ensure only an invited audience attends, with arguably the most noise being made by the journalists themselves who they no longer have to go through the ordeal of cramming most of their yearly output into three days.

I, however, have yet to meet a developer that doesn’t lament the death of perhaps the greatest videogaming spectacle ever made. Don’t believe the naysayers – if you never attended, you missed out on a truly amazing experience, the likes of which may never happen again.