Modeling techniques for movies and commercial production?
 

I am wondering what types of modeling techniques are used for non moving set props in movies and commercials. I was checking this guy's squid models and they are all high polygonal object that are textured without using smooth meshes. Is this the way to go for assets like these in movies or films? in almost every cg breakdown clips i see high polygonal objects instead of smooth meshes. is that the way to go mostly?

heres an example video.
CGI VFX Making of HD: "Metro" by Main Road Post - YouTube

and in these models i only see high polygonal objects. is this bec of texturing and polygon count concerns?

http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/...e-model/719634

What do you mean by "smooth meshes"? NURBS? They're barely used in production anymore.

if you are referring to the smooth mesh option in maya display (when you press 3) then thats not quite the same for final render... go to mesh and choose smooth, you will see exactly what maya does, the only difference is in the viewport you will not see the complete wireframe. for final render i dont think its nessesairy to use smooth mesh in every case, because they take render time. instead of using smooth mesh i think they manually use tools like bevel and add more polygons to the areas that are in need of quality, rather than adding unnessesairy polygons to areas where they arent needed.

I meant subdivision surfaces with smooth.