Maya 6 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide

Chapter 7. NURBS Curves and Surfaces

You can use NURBS curves to create nearly any object—a medieval knight, a detailed car, an alien, or just about any other object you can imagine. Because they can be highly organic, characterized by sinuous, rounded shapes, NURBS surfaces are great for creating trees, faces, and streamlined vehicles.

For anyone who has used other software programs with Bézier curves (for example, Adobe Illustrator), NURBS curve creation should come quite naturally. Although NURBS curves are different than Bézier curves, you create and edit them similarly. Bézier and NURBS curves represent curved lines whose shape you can edit by translating points along the curve (the placement of the original points was specified at the curve’s ...