I find NURBS are the best way for me to quickly prototype shapes that have a lot of curves, such as organic character bodys, the outlines of vehicles or landscapes. You can draw the curves freehand, duplicate, adjust, and then loft the shapes you want. You can easily modify the resulting shapes by tweaking the curves.
Scratching out a head with NURBS though is a bit odd and counter intuitive. You can build a face very quickly by manipulating a NURBS sphere, but as you add other NURBS shapes for eyelids and ears you will probably wish you started patch modelling from the get go. I find Polys (starting from a primitive) better for character faces and much better for hands and such. In fact, I wouldn't advise trying to build hands from NURBS at all. A NURB is basically a rectangle at the end of the day with a single pole you can shape round (spherically or cylindrically), they're great and simple, but not so if you want multiple appendages from the same surface (you only have one 'hole' on a pole, whereas polys can grow from any face or edge). POLYs are excellant for heads, hands and feet though. For example to create a character I rough out the torso, legs and arms with NURBS. Then I convert it to a Poly object keeping all details and standard fit. Then I use the poly shape to 'grow' the hands and wrists from, then the head. Then I convert to SUBD, to smooth it on the cheap processor and performance wise, and add details.
Furniture, interiors, buildings, polygons rule, no question, they are very quick to use. I'd also say you do need both. As Polys have been around a lot longer the tools to manipulate them are very many. On the whole I find I start with NURBS as outlines and then go to polys as I said above. Also, animating and rigging a poly object is a helluva lot easier than NURBS I've found.
This is just my opinion though, the only way is to get a grip with all 3 approaches Nurbs, Polys and Subds and develop your own workflow for each 'type' of model you create,
Last edited by geezbtw; 04-09-2004 at 06:12 PM.