Well....polygon....it's not polygon actually,it is NURBS, an kind of representation for surface, it's not accurate & suitable for engineering purpose such as CNC, but already good enough for rendering due to its small size. Within Max, the model was constructed with NURBS(Surface Modelling), which is different from patch, polygon, mesh and boolean modelling.What you see on the screen is NURBS, but it will be converted or simulated to polygons during rendering, and the accuracy you set for the NURBS within MAX is the rate how detail you want the transfer be. The higher the accuracy, the more the polygon and the longer the rendering time!
It's just for fun, not my freelance work. For the code of practice, I would not expose any freelance work to the outside, except with the permission from the client, I'm sorry about that!
Reason for SolidWorks+Rhino:
1.$ saving(SolidWorks-about$50K, Rhino-about$7K)
2. SolidWork is convenient & good at solid modelling(Boolean expression), but rather weak in surface modelling and rendering, although SolidWorks has their own surface modeller and renderer but the performance and convenience are.......

so I utilize the strong surface modelling feature of Rhino and combine it with SolidWorks, they are perfect match but still only suitable for modelling, it would be better if you can fully manipulate the BMRT or Flamingo within Rhino for rendering, I've asked the technican in Rhino about the comparison between BMRT, Flamingo, Renderman, FinalRender and Mental Ray, they don't have much comment for this issue, this indicated....
I learnt these softwares after leaving IVE, I learnt Euclid 3, AutoCad and CadKey in IVE(named TC at that time), right now they have Alias/Wavefront product!