Hi JPB, some great looking results there!

Yeah from what you are showing there I would think that NURBS would be a better mechanism for you.


> I recently acquired Modo in order to try my hand on subd poly
> modelling but so far I found it to be far from what I feel compfortable
> with and the learning curve seems rather steep.

Yeah, I think it is quite easy to underestimate the learning curve required to get proficient in sub-d modeling.

One thing that is really nice with NURBS modeling is that it is able to leverage a strong element of working with 2D curves. In sub-d modeling you tend to be forced to work with a sea of 3D points more directly. They have tools for helping you to work with a large number of points, but it is a fairly difficult skill to master and it is not similar to many other kinds of tasks that you may have done before (unlike 2D curve drawing).

I've often seen people watch a 1 minute video that shows an experienced sub-d artist making a really cool monster head in about a minute starting from a box, then they think that the sub-d package is going to make it easy for them to do the same thing. But what they were really seeing there are a whole lot of advanced skills that took that artist a long time to develop...


At any rate, Modo is a pretty cool thing to have in your toolbox for rendering even if you're not going to be doing sub-d modeling. And if you do end up with a project that is better aligned to sub-d then you can dig more into learning that workflow at that point.


For the right kind of project (especially characters, faces, organic stuff like that), definitely subd is the better tool for it, but you also need to be prepared to make an investment of time with it.

- Michael