One way of modeling in 3ds Max is with NURBS surfaces and curves. NURBS, which stands for Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines, is an industry standard for designing and modeling surfaces. It is particularly suitable for modeling surfaces with complex curves.
The tools for modeling with NURBS do not require an understanding of the mathematics that produces these objects. NURBS is popular because the objects are easy to manipulate interactively, and because the algorithms that create them are both efficient and numerically stable.
Fountain created as a NURBS model
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 complex curved surfaces.
- Because meshes are faceted, facets appear at the edge of rendered objects. A large number of small faces is necessary 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.)