btw , here is a good tutorial of modeling a dino with mirai's little brother - nendo ...
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This T-Rex was modeled in Nichimen's Nendo in approximately 8 total hours.
I chose Nendo because it is a great polygon modeler and in my experiences polygons are the best method for animation in 3dsmax. Keeping animation in mind, I modeled it with just enough detail at the joints etc., so that it would animate properly.
When it comes to modeling it's not only about trying, just to make what you want. It is more about making what you want and then being able to do something with it. Using a lower res model will let you morph in real time for instance. Other methods will suck up system resources when there is no need for detail. After all the only time detail matters is in the final render.
An example would be metaball models. they are quick and easy but very tough to animate because they have no optimization. Nurbs are great and have mapping advantages but In all reality they are basically unanimatble in a production environment using 3dsmax.
Animating a fairly low res polygon control mesh with meshsmooth on top at render time will give you a similar effect to nurbs. Again its not about the modeling method. It is irrelevant how create your model. The issue is what are you going to be able to do with it.
Here is a render of the actaul wireframe that I modeled. There is no smoothing on this mesh, I added all the detail in Nendo using edge connects and cuts.
I'm going to walk away from explaining exactly how I did the modeling on the Rex. My suggestion would be to goto Nichimen's site, download the Nendo demo, and do the included Penguin tutorial. It will show you all the concepts needed. There is no rhyme or reason to using Nendo. You pretty much start with a cube and chop it up a million times and connect a million edges and basically sculpt your object.
It's not really "box modeling" because your not really doing all kinds of extrudes and bevels. you may do a couple to get the general shape but that's about it. The rest is actually created each of the edges you need to add detail.
A tip when using nendo with 3dsmax, goto Max3D and download the OBJ importer and OBJ exporter. You want to use these to translate back and forth between Nendo and 3DSMAX.
The reason for this is it will keep the correct edges hidden since MAX doesn't support true quad polygons. This means when you import the "true" quad polygons MAX will make it into 2 triangles with the middle edge hidden.
Mapping will probably only make sense if you have an intermediate sense of the material editor and uvw mapping.
The toughest part and also the down side to using polygons is they have no UV mapping coordinates. So, you must apply mapping coordinates to them.
For complex shapes you can use multiple UVW gizmos. For the rex I used many. A few I used are: a planar for the side, top, bottom, front etc. You can give these UVW gizmos unique ID's so when you apply maps you can tell which map goes with which UVW gizmo.
Basicly you want to layer maps on top of each other to cover up the stretching. For instance the side planar map will stretch on the top and front. You want to cover it with a map projected from the top using a mask so it doesn't streak on the sides. It may take some experimenting to grasp what im talking about. Here are some screen shots that will hopefully help with the idea.
Using composite material you can layer maps with masks in between them to control the different layers transparency
Notice the stretching on the front in the first screenshot and notice the stretching on the side in the second shot.
We can fix this using a mask to control where Front map is transparent.
Here is a partial screen shot of the material tree. You can see how the materials are layered.
