Thanks John,

1. poly preview smooth 3 - means pressing the keyboard 3 key to smooth. The 1-key is unsmoothed, the 2-key is smoothed with unsmoothed cage, and the 3-key is smooth preview.

It's called smooth preview because in older versions of maya you could not render this. You would just get an unsmoothed render. So you would have to do a poly smooth with 2 divisions to get an equivalent render. From Maya 8 on I believe you no longer need to do the smooth and can render directly from the 3-key preview smooth. That is what I do as I rarely need to go beyond 2 divisions of smoothing.

2. Are the renders in my shots smoothed? Yes and no, most of the parts are smoothed 2 divisions (3-key). But many of the parts are also unsmoothed with bevels with 1-4 edges. For machined boxy parts I find beveling to be sufficient and looks more accurate and keeps the poly count lower as you are not dividing poly's that do not need to be divided.

3. I chose to model the upper back can in polys because I found the nurbs version of the can although very clean and accurate to had a different look from the other cans and I did not want to remodel all of them. Also, I find poly uv's more flexible for texturing then nurbs.