This Tutorial are made with 3dsmax in mind, but can probably be followed with other programs supporting sudivision surfaces..

When modelling with nurms, there are a few basic consepts wich is important to understand.

For those of you with a good understanding og basic nurms modelling, feel free to skip this section..

1. It is important to understand how nurms surfaces subdivide, and how to make the desired curves with as few control points as possible.

Lets consider the following b-spline curve:


Where would one place the control points to replicate this curve with a nurms surface?
Lets give it a try.... make a standard max line, marking the points where you would think the control points of the nurms surface should be..

Here is my attempt:


There are no "one" answer to this, and you could probably make a good representation of the above curve with fewer or more points.

The important thing is to experiment, and get a "feel" of how nurms surfaces are made..

Now if you make a basic extrude on your curve to make some polygons, and the place a nurms modifier on top of this, you will see how close your nurms surface are to the starting curve..:


Pretty close..

If your attemt wasnt that succesfull, keep tweaking the control points until you are satisfied with the results..

If we look at the control cage, and the subdivided surface at the same time, we can observe that the nurms surface are trying to touch the middle of the "edge" between the control points.
This is important to take into consideration when placing control points..: