Creating NURBS Surfaces from Geometric Primitives

You can turn a 3DS MAX Standard Primitive into a NURBS object formed of CV surfaces. (You can’t convert Extended Primitive objects in this way.) Once converted, you can no longer edit the object parametrically, but you can edit it as a NURBS object, moving CVs and so on.

Tips:

• Sometimes converting the primitive to a NURBS object causes its normals to point the wrong way. You can see this in shaded viewports. If this happens, turn on Flip Normals at the Surface sub-object level.
• Geospheres are good for creating rounded models with no sharp edges.
• Boxes are good for creating models that have sharp edges.
• Flattened cones work well for models whose contours are roughly triangular.

How To

To turn a primitive into a NURBS object:

1. Create the primitive object.
2. Go to the Modify command panel.
3. In the Modifier Stack rollout, click Edit Stack.
4. Choose NURBS Surface from the pop-up menu that appears.

The object is converted to one or more CV surfaces. The surfaces might be independent surface sub-objects, or they can be dependent surface sub-objects such as Lathe.