>   What are the advantages of NURBS (or should I say NURBSes?) over
>  bicubic pathces?

Wha....? I thought bicubic patches *were* a specific subset of NURBs?
General NURB support, therefore, would be more flexible, by doing
anything a patch can do but being more adaptable? Wouldn't it? Okay,
If I'm wrong, blame it on being tired. I shouldn't be allowed near
a keyboard when I'm tired. 

As to the matter of smaller file size... yeah, guess so, although I'd
be more concerned with render-time memory savings than stored file
sizes. Bezier patches, if I remember rightly, have (or at least had?)
an option to choose between patch types that preprocessed to triangles
or on-the-fly control point calculations. This traded off memory size
for computation speed depending on your needs. I imagine if 
generalized NURBs were implemented, it would have similar options. 
Nowadays, with faster processors, computations speed would probably
be less of a concern than available memory with huge models. Could 
be nice in that case.


Charles
-- 
http://www.enter.net/~cfusner
"...Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time,
 and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell..." 
                              -The Two Towers, JRR Tolkien

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