Hi Steve, I understand you now, sorry I leapt to an incorrect conclusion there.

A sports-car type thing does tend to be a pretty difficult thing to do, there are many aspects of it that are kind of similar to sort of face / character modeling that sub-d is so good at, like it tends to involve kind of organic shapes that need to blend completely smoothly together in many different directions.

That kind of full-directional blending happens just automatically with sub-d, so some of the same things that make subd good for faces also make it kind of easier for this as well.

But it does seem that most of the people who do a whole lot of car design stuff actually do use NURBS for it, but I think it tends to take a more carefully thought out modeling strategy to make it work well.

Once you have some experience in those kinds of strategies, then some of the NURBS type design tools can let you go quickly at that point since you then build kind of individual panels of the car really quickly from some curves instead of needing to do a large amount of individual point manipulations.


The tricky part is that for someone who already has a background in sub-d modeling, they don't have to adopt a significantly different strategy for doing the car, but for NURBS modeling it takes a lot more new strategy learning.

It kind of demands the more advanced type of NURBS modeling where you are working on an individual surfacing level and not really at the solids and booleans type level. The solids and booleans type level tends to be a lot easier (lower learning curve I mean) for someone to get up to speed on who is not familiar with NURBS. A car is more like jumping directly into the deep end right away...

- Michael