Michael Wilde shows a great tip for using move along normals rather than using the scale tool on Maya components.

Adjustments. They can go on forever: moving faces, vertices, sliding edges, and tweaking form. While we are all used to using the scale tool to modify shapes, sometimes it’s not always the best thing to do. This new quick tip from Modeling and Texture Artist Michael Wilde shows that using the move tool can prove better in many situations.

Move Along Normals.

When it comes to transformations, like scale, there is one that gets overlooked, and that’s the move tool. It might not seem intuitive that you can scale objects using the move tool, but as Wilde shows, setting the move tool to move along normals changes everything. Using a normals-based transformation can keep the volume of the components, much more so than using the scale tool itself.