Scuplting in Maya gone wrong

For some reason my nurbs are always pointy on high quality and when i unclick the high quality they go smooth, but it makes everything else non high quality like the texture etc, any idea whats going wrong? Thanks in advance.

High Quality display mode can be buggy, especially if you're not running 100% Maya-qualified hardware, which you're probably not. Maya is intended to be run on a workstation, not on a gaming rig, and especially not on a business grade machine or below. Only workstation graphics cards (Quadro, FirePro, and FireGL) are officially supported. Consumer graphics cards (GeForce and Radeon) are not supported at all. And if you're on an Intel GMA, forget about it. You're lucky it even runs at all.

As a courtesy, Autodesk does test Maya on SOME high end consumer cards. Some work, some don't. But even for the ones they determine do work, the literature is quick to point out that consumer grade hardware is totally unsupported. If it works, they just consider it a happy coincidence, nothing more.

You can find the complete listing of qualified and tested hardware for your version of Maya and your OS at http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?siteID=123112&id=13583898


That said, assuming your hardware is indeed working properly for Maya, then another possibility is you just might be working at the wrong NURBS display level. Level 2 is the closest approximation to what your sculpties will look like in-world. If you're at level 3, not only will your source models look way smoother than your sculpties, but there may well be more triangles on your screen than your machine can comfortably handle. Your graphics card might simply be choking under the strain when high quality mode is enabled. Or the opposite might be happening. If you're at level 1, your NURBS surfaces should look quite angular. But if your system isn't handling lighting very well in standard mode, then it might take switching to high quality just for you to see the actual shapes you're working with.

It's also possible that you simply haven't been modeling quite as well as you'd thought.

But without seeing some screenshots, it's pretty tough to determine what's actually going on. There are tons of possibilities.