Introduction to NURBS Modeling

Fountain created as a NURBS model

3ds max provides NURBS surfaces and curves. NURBS stands for Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines. NURBS have become an industry standard for designing and modeling surfaces. They are especially suited for modeling surfaces with complicated curves. The tools for modeling with NURBS do not require an understanding of the mathematics that produces these objects. NURBS are popular because they are easy to manipulate interactively, and because the algorithms that create them are both efficient and numerically stable.

You can also model surfaces using polygonal meshes or patches. Compared to NURBS surfaces, meshes and patches have these shortcomings:

Using polygons can make it more difficult to create complicated curved surfaces.
Because meshes are faceted, facets appear at the edge of rendered objects. You must have a large number of small faces to render a smoothly curved edge.

NURBS surfaces, on the other hand, are analytically generated. They are more efficient to calculate, and you can render a NURBS surface that appears to be seamless. (A rendered NURBS surface is actually approximated by polygons, but the NURBS approximation can be very fine grained.)

NURBS Models: Objects and Sub-Objects

NURBS and Modifiers

NURBS and Animation

NURBS Concepts