Stay away from IGES, it's old and doesn't work well even though Maya/Max support it. No one can agree on how to handled trimmed surfaces (128) and you end up with a lot of orphan patches etc.

STEP is good, but my experience in loading this format to Maya/Max isn't good as they still don't seem to treat the surface patches consistently. Especially if what you want to import is an assembly of components.

Normally I'm using Okino with Maya to direct import and tessellate.

Bummer. So from a practical standpoint it seems that you just stick with exporting polys. Not the end of the world. I'm kind of surprised that things are so creaky on this end. Working in Nurbs has been a pleasure so far for hard surface stuff like vehicles. I can't imagine wasting the time hassling with subds after this.

You really need to test it for yourself. I tend to deal with large assemblies, not small discrete part subsets. I've seen people use it but the other downside is getting it out of Maya while it resides in Maya as NURBS is horrible. It literally breaks up all the surface patches and you end up with 1 object per patch.

Hi Jim,

> I'm kind of surprised that things are so creaky on this end.

The problem is that animation programs largely abandoned NURBS back around ~15 years or so ago in favor of sub-d modeling (which is better suited for stuff like characters/faces/organics stuff like that), so their support is kind of vestigial and was never really driven in such a way to target the best strengths of NURBS in the first place (mechanical / hard surface modeling).

That's why you can find a lot of discussions in animation forums about avoiding NURBS and "NURBS are useless", etc.. etc... - a lot of those people just don't realize that their animation-oriented tool only has kind of half baked and undeveloped NURBS support, and then they judge NURBS modeling based on that.

But yeah if you use it for the right kind of model (mechanical, generally man-made things, things with holes and cuts in them, ...) a NURBS toolset that tries to generally target those strengths can be great.

- Michael