Modeling

There are five popular ways to represent a model:

    * Polygonal modeling - Points in 3D space, called vertices, are connected by line segments to form a           polygonal mesh.
    * NURBS modeling - NURBS Surfaces are defined by spline curves, which are influenced by weighted control points.Increasing the weight for a point will pull the curve closer to that point. NURBS are truly smooth surfaces,for organic modeling. Maya, Rhino 3d and solid Thinking are the most well-known commercial software that uses NURBS natively.
   * Splines & Patches modeling - Like NURBS, Splines and Patches depend on curved lines to define  the visible surface.
    * Primitives modeling - This procedure takes geometric primitives like balls, cylinders, cones or cubes as building blocks for more complex models. Benefits are quick and easy construction and that the forms are mathematically defined and thus absolutely precise, also the definition  language can be much simpler.
    * Sculpt modeling - Still fairly new method of modeling 3D sculpting has become very popular in the few short years it has been around. There are 2 types of this currently, Displacement which is the most widely used among applications at this moment, and volumetric. Displacement uses a dense model (often generated by Subdivision surfaces of a polygon control mesh) and stores new locations for the vertex positions through use of a 32bit image map that stores the adjusted locations.