What’s the difference between NURBS, Polygons and Subdivisions?

Hi Ivr,

Polygon Meshes: Basic Meshes, may consist of Triangles, Quads and nGons. May be Low or High poly according to Polycount, may be "unclean" in the sense that triangles or nGons cause problems for the renderer, but usualy a polygon mesh around here should be nice and ready to work.
Subdivision-Ready: All attributes as a Polygon mesh EXEPT it should consist mostly of quads (faces with 4 edges, not more, not less). This allows the mesh to be subdividable and therefore to be smoothed (1 quad face divides into 4 smaller quad faces). If there are hard edges in the model the have to treated with care otherwise they will be lost in the smoothing process. In some cases triangles are necessary and also important. I will stop it here, but there is much more to it of course.
NURBS: = non uniform rational B-Splines = mathematicaly calculated surfaces from splines. very flexible and handy sometimes, used often in CAD software due to the fact that they are exact in a mathematical sense (e.g. a chamfer radius of 4 mm is exactly 4mm without any approximation). Their big downside is that you have to convert them to polygons to apply certain rigging to them, or even to get them into another software package, wich converts them into a mediocre polygon mesh most of the time.

Well...it's a complex topic but I hope this is a good start for you.

Cheers,
mako3d

You're welcome :)

Polygons are standard nowadays because you have more freedom while modeling. Another advantage is that when you texture a model you can layout the UV shell in a way that it is easily readable for your eyes where certain regions in the texture belong on which part of the model. texturing in Photoshop will be a lot easier this way.
NURBS surfaces are cheap in memory. since they are calculated by math it needs fewer points to be stored to describe a smooth surface.
SubD´s try to combine both. In order to texture a subD object you will have to convert to polygons an layout the UVs... then convert back.
https://19216811wiki.com/

Hi wiki,

Polygons are standard for Games, VFX and Applications where mathematical detail for measurement is not necessarily needed. The fact you mentioned about UV mapping is true. In Industry Design and CAD NURBS are standard, for certain ArchViz purposes NURBS is the only way to go as well.

Subdivision Surfaces are polygons all the way, there is no conversion necessary, only subdivision of polygons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subdivision_surface
Therefore also UV layouting can be done right from the spot. Sometimes it may be necessary to create UVs from a higher Iteration, but mostly everything works out fine and saves you tons of time.