Some artwork (3d car: Pagani Zonda)

[Matt Hallock]

Originally posted by Lev
Well - the beautiful part of NURBS is that the actual hull is hidden from the user most of the time - you can just work with the curves, and can build a whole detailed surface without even touching the actual surface CVs.

What i meant by creating extra geometry just to define curvature is following:

Suppose you want to create a fillet along an edge in your surface. In Polys, you would have to chamfer it, and then tweak the chamfer amount ,and maybe even the generated verticies to adjust the curvature of the fillet. In NURBS (in theory - it almost never works the way its supposed to in max) you'd just create a fillet surface with a specified radius - and wont have to worry about tweaking the CVs, because the software would do it for you and hide the CVs themselves

And about controlling the meshsmooth - if you are referring to adjusting the edge/vertex weights for NURMS, it is the most awkward way of controlling curvature of your model, because the weights are affecting the whole surface, and all of your model will get distorted by setting weight value too high (for example, if you'd like to make a sharp edge) The results from chamfering the edge are much more predictable.

The results of the meshsmooth are as well predictable when used properly. As long as the base model has enough vertices you can easily stop distortion.