Hi scott, it kind of looks like you're currently constructing this by going around and building individual pieces of it surface-by-surface. It's possible to do things that way but it usually tends to be easier to try and build a base solid block to start with and then do booleans to carve off chunks of it. So you'd want to have some base extrusion with the top capped off right from early on rather than leaving that as something to do at the end.

I guess the difficulty you had in this case is you have some kind of scooped out areas that you were focused on building first maybe?

You might want to build scooped out areas by having an extended cutting surface that does shoot out a ways past the base solid, and then do a boolean difference to cut it out, something more like this:








So note that with this example above here I'm working with a larger solid block that I created initially and the scoop out part is a larger extended surface that intentionally extends a fair distance punching all the way through the solid. Then the final edges of the scoop are not something I tried to draw in directly myself, rather they are calculated during the boolean operation that intersects the scoop piece with the base solid.

This method of building extended pieces and then letting some of the final edges be calculated by intersections between parts during boolean operations rather than trying to draw them in directly yourself is probably the key difference from your current "patch by patch" type modeling strategy.

Does that help make sense on a better approach maybe?

If you are not using booleans to form many of your final edges it probably means you are not using the best NURBS workflow, it's easy especially for people coming from a polygon modeling background to want to manually draw in every single edge and be very hesitant about using booleans but in NURBS modeling it's usually optimal to be using booleans as much as you possibly can and having some of your final 3D edge curves come as the result of boolean calculations rather than directly drawing them in 3D yourself.

If you try to keep your model as a solid from the beginning and then try to cut pieces away from that solid it's usually a better approach than going around patch-by-patch and focusing so much on individual hole filling.

- Michael