Hi Stever & Rich_Art - that's a pretty common thing to have some difficulty thinking differently than a polygon modeling strategy. I mean it's really to be expected if you've spent a long time thinking about modeling things in that particular way.

For NURBS modeling the basic idea is to think more about cutting parts with booleans as a primary way of making the shape.

It can be easier to recognize to use a boolean when you are cutting a hole out of the interior of an object, that just kind of registers in the mind more easily as a "cut".

The part that seems to be harder for polygon modelers (and just maybe in general too) to often see is applying booleans that cut some of the outside part of the object away instead of only cutting away interior holes.

Anyway, that seems to come up fairly often so that general idea of building some extended shape and then cutting off some pieces of it is just something to try and keep in mind when you're deciding how to approach a particular shape. If it looks like there is some kind of underlying broad shape that then comes to some sudden end or has some kind of irregularity in its borders, you'll usually want to model that big underlying shape first and then apply cuts to that.


Once you get the knack of this method though it becomes very quick to construct mechanical shapes which often fit in really well with that technique.

- Michael