Nurbs are great, I'm planning on looking into making nurbs characters then converting to poly's - Personally I like Rhino3d, and I'd urge anyone who's interested in NURBS to try the demo, it's just a very clean and straightforward modeller, it's arguably the best NURBS modeller on PC. It's not always a case of crazy polygon counts though, making a building for instance with NURBS takes seconds, draw a box, cut out the rooms, cut out the doors and windows... IMO there's no faster way to do it - your ultimately left with one object cutting holes in another, which is so damn easy to understand and learn that it can really help with all aspects of learning to model.
With the slant towards normal mapping, you have to consider the best way to impliment high detail into your model. It's really not the best idea to convert a heightmap to a normal map and expect it to look good - but using nurbs you always have a max detail version, which can be used to make a low poly version and a high poly version for converting into normal maps. The actual conversion is a complex process right now, but I imagine it's possible to make an application in DBPro to help. Like I'm imagining putting a high and low poly version in the same place, then checking collision on the high poly model with each texture coordinate. With this more detailed collision check it could generate the normal for the low poly's texture, and I think will give a much nicer look. The important thing for me though is that I understand how that can work, and how I can accomplish that myself. For too long massive detail normal maps have been a mystery to me
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''Stick that in your text and scroll it!.''
