Hi Bogdan,

> I have picked as a subject a car, for the reason that if we look
> around, almost everybody, when do start 3D modelling, you
> guessed it... is gonna pick a car as a subject.

Yeah a lot of people actually pick a human face as a beginning subject too, but that is also a really difficult subject and another one that is especially well suited for poly/sub-d...

One technique that can work pretty well for this kind of thing is a sort of hybrid approach, where you start in NURBS tracing curves, and sweep some panels out to get some basic forms in place. Then convert those into polygons and take them into a sub-d modeler and do further refinements in there, connecting polygons together and making some adjustments.

That kind of lets you leverage some of the best parts of each method - there are a lot of panels of the car that you can generate really quickly by sweeping NURBS but then use sub-d to connect pieces together to get that kind of all-directional melted blending between all pieces.

You can do that with human faces as well, but it is even more suited for cars because there are kind of more natural large panel areas that are well suited for sweeping.


One other very general tip is that when doing this kind of surfacing in NURBS in many cases you need to imagine the "trims" in the original panels. Like when you come to a wheel well, don't try to build little surfaces hugging along each outline curves like you would with a poly modeler. Instead you want to build bigger surfaces that kind of extend through those areas, then trim holes and cut away areas.

That's a really key thing that lets you move faster and keep larger areas nice and smooth.

That takes some getting used to since trimming is so generally avoided in polygon modeling but similar to booleans it is a more fundamental frequently used thing in NURBS modeling.

- Michael