Maya - Polygons or NURBS?

I've been seeing that people use both, but when it comes to exporting and making "sculpties" it seems like people stick to modeling with nurbs.

Does second life only allow nurbs or is it just something that people find easier to use? Is Primstar good for exporting polygon meshes to second life or no?

EDIT: I figured this might be more helpful. I am much more experienced with polygons than nurbs. I am still learning the UV layouts with the SL premapped prims, and I personally have no issue with making UV's like that for my own start-from-scratch models in maya or blender. I just can't find clear answers for the proper or best approach to scultpies.

The Second Life Maya importer is optimized for NURBS, so that's probably why people are mostly using NURBS. There's a bit more of the what you see is what you get with NURBS, too, at least with Maya. Most other importers seem to use polygon models. If I feel like polygons, I use Sculpty Maker (which is for Zbrush). You have to invert the sculptmap in Photoshop, though.

Is there a possibility of doing that with polygons at all for blender then?

I'll let one of the Blender people answer that, but I don't see why not in principle.

Hopefully they do. Thank you for the help!

I know with Blender and the Primstar Scripts, if you can unwrap the uv to a square layout in quads it'll do the sculpt map (mostly) without much difficulty.
Not high detail, of course. Max polys are 1056 I think. Anything over that will be lost.
Re import, clean up and it's done.
There's a reasonably new feature called 'Make Sculpt" from a nurbs mesh too.
I'm not fully clued up on all the details myself.

Yeah, Primstar for Blender supports polys, nurbs and curves. It was originally designed with a polygon workflow in mind, so it's strongest there. It supports curves and nurbs through the "Sculptify" command which will convert them to a polygon sculpt mesh.

If you are using it to bake models from other applications, then .obj is the best way to transfer them. If the mesh is a quad grid (like a subdivided plane) then Primstar's import can do the UV mapping for you, otherwise you'll need to manually unwrap to a rectangular / square UV layout.

One of the design goals with Primstar was to get out of the way and let Blender do it's thing. That's why there's not a proper or best way to approach things. There's usually at least 3 or 4 different ways to approach making the same sculptie.

Thank you so much for the help! Now I just have to get used to the importing part from one program to another. Once again, thank you all!

Sculptie exporters for polygons generally sample the vertex positions of the proxy mesh when they generate a map. I say generally 1) because the exporter I use can switch between vertex sampling and surface sampling 2) I haven't used ALL poly based sculpty exporters, so there could be one that does not.

The Maya exporter does not have this option, it can only sample arbitrary surface points. NURBS have no vertexes to sample, so it makes no sense to write a script to sample vertex points if you assume that only NURBS will be used. Thus folks say it's 'optomized for NURBS'.

You can still use polygons as a sculpty proxy in Maya, but it requires a bit more savvy than using NURBS primitives. This, coupled with no per vertex sampling option to make it worth while, seems to account for most Maya users using NURBS to make sculpties.

Ok, I think I understand that. I think I'll just stick with Primstar and Blender, then.

Thanks for clarifying!