P-Nurbs VS PatchSmooth

[AJ]

You don't have to worry about p-Nurbs, since it was 'added' to Max in the form of NURMS Meshsmoothing (a.k.a : Subdivision/Sub-D) and was therefore only really useful for users of 2/2.5

As for Patchsmooth - the details of it's methods are explained by Daniel Martinez Lara on his site Here (http://www.3dluvr.com/pepeland/Misc/patchsmo.htm)

It's essentially a clever way of working on a mesh whilst at the top of the stack it becomes converted to patches - and then the built in 'relax' controls used to soften your mesh (much like Meshsmooth/P-Nurbs).

It doesn't quite work 100% - and you can get some extreme oddness if you're going for a very smooth surface with detail in it at some point. But it's a pretty ingenius method, and of course opens you up to thinking of other ways of swapping between Mesh/Poly/Patch objects!

As you're starting out (as it were) I'd stick with using Meshsmooth (NURMS) for your modelling right now, then pick up some stuff on patches, then look in at Patchsmooth and the like.

Hope this helps!

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