> I've heard artists are scared of it due to how amazingly awful some editors managed to make the NURBS editing experience, but with a decent editor it really wouldn't be a problem.
That's simply not true. I started getting into (high end) 3D in the early 90's. I've probably used every NURB or higher order surface modeling tool under the sun since then.
In fact, there are many amazing modeling tools for working with NURBs or other higher order surfaces.
They just all don't even come remotely close to polygon modeling when precision is secondary and workflow/ease of use is paramount.
So the answer in the VFX world, for years, has been subdivision surfaces. They have almost all of the good of bi-cubic patch modeling and almost all of the good of polygon modeling. What's more, existing polygon modeling tools can easily be upgraded to subdivision surface modelers by merely enforcing 2-manifold topology and adding the ability to display an [approximation to] the limit surface in real time.
Some of the schemes have nice properties. For example, after one step of Catmull-Clark, the entire surface consists of quads. And when treating each local grid of quads as the control polyhedron of a cubic b-spline patch (not a NURB but an UNRB, a uniform, non rational b-spline patch), the surface of the patch is equal to the limit surface that would be obtained by the subdivision scheme.
>> the surface of the patch is equal to the limit surface that would be obtained by the subdivision scheme.
That's not true if any of the vertices is extraordinary. In other words a vertex shared by more or less than 4 quads. The good news is that subdividing those quads each into 4 smaller ones will result in 3/4 of the surface area meeting the right criteria. Or the area hard to deal with becomes 1/4 the size.
The ultimate coolness of subdivision surfaces is that every vertex on a subdivided mesh is a leaner combination of the original vertices. The weights do not change during animation. The weights only change if the topology does. Another nice thing is that meshes at different LOD contain the vertices of the lower LOD mesh.
They really do everything with one exception - they can't exactly represent quadric surfaces which are so important in CAD tools.
That's simply not true. I started getting into (high end) 3D in the early 90's. I've probably used every NURB or higher order surface modeling tool under the sun since then.
In fact, there are many amazing modeling tools for working with NURBs or other higher order surfaces.
They just all don't even come remotely close to polygon modeling when precision is secondary and workflow/ease of use is paramount.
So the answer in the VFX world, for years, has been subdivision surfaces. They have almost all of the good of bi-cubic patch modeling and almost all of the good of polygon modeling. What's more, existing polygon modeling tools can easily be upgraded to subdivision surface modelers by merely enforcing 2-manifold topology and adding the ability to display an [approximation to] the limit surface in real time.
Some of the schemes have nice properties. For example, after one step of Catmull-Clark, the entire surface consists of quads. And when treating each local grid of quads as the control polyhedron of a cubic b-spline patch (not a NURB but an UNRB, a uniform, non rational b-spline patch), the surface of the patch is equal to the limit surface that would be obtained by the subdivision scheme.