It’s a bit odd, really, but I’ve found that there really isn’t much good information about using NURBS in the polygon-dominated entertainment industry. Now, if all you want is to get really high density polygon meshes to an STL printer, life is easy; every program that can render NURBS can convert them to highly tessellated polygons for you. But if you want to actually create, say, a lightweight subdivision surface cage, the options are slim. Maya can convert, but its methods are far more geared toward converting untrimmed surfaces into its own multi-resolution subdivision surface format. If you want to do trimmed surfaces, I honestly think MoI is the only program that makes it doable without spending ages in cleanup. So, through trial and error and some rather old info from the early Maya years, I’ve pieced together the shaky bits of a system. I will share that here to both help others along, elicit comments and suggestions, and maybe to prod some features out of Michael if I’m lucky. ;)

I’m going to make a wild ass guess that if you’re reading this, you at least have some passing familiarity with NURBS and polygon modeling. And hopefully you understand something about Catmul-Clarke style subdivision surfaces as well, since my method is optimized to achieving polygon meshes that subdivide in a way that mimics the original NURBS objects. I’ll try not to go really basic, but won’t assume master level knowledge either. I’ll try to explain my “whys” as thoroughly as possible, but I might skip over something that is important; in that case, call me on it.