Hi Kevin, I wish I had enough time available to work on all the small details that you're really interested in. But unfortunately it is just not going to be feasible for me to spend much time on this.

But here is generally what I would probably go for with a NURBS approach:





Model is attached as PantherNURBS_3dm.zip .

I fully understand that this does not have many of the details that you need, but it may give you some ideas of what could be possible.

But I don't think though that there is really any good reason for you to switch off of your polygon modeling workflow for this task. At the level of detail that you want to achieve, I don't really think that you are going to gain any benefits by trying to do it with the NURBS toolset, there are a lot of detailed things and problem areas that you would have to sort of navigate through. If you didn't care so much about the specific details you could possibly get a speed boost for this but with the target that you have in mind I think you'll be looking at decreased speed for this particular type of task. And that would be after a ramp up period to get accustomed to a different toolset. It does not leverage the "sweet spot" of NURBS that would deliver a speed increase for things like heavy booleans.

At any rate, you can see the results here of some of the more component based structuring that I was referring to earlier, and can at least show that you can get good surface quality with the right kind of strategy.

- Michael