Yep, all nurbs are converted to polygonal objects for rendering.

and yep, I ment the "smooth edge" option under the tesselation options. I was to lazy the launch maya and look at the names so I was pulling them from my ... memory (smile).

Albert Alverez of Gnomon Inc. has a free online (non-video) tutorial (available at both the gnomon online site and highend3d as I recall) where he talks about tesselation in some detail. Still he does not really give a workflow. He just describes all the various options.

By the way now that you now about nurbs tesselation I would anticipate your next question might be - What if I have a ton of nurbs in my scene? It would become tedious to have to open each one in the attribute editor and fiddle with its tesselation.

This is true and is one reason I really switched from nurbs to a polygon/subd/poly smooth workflow. However, there is something that can help out with this process.

Look under windows>general editors>attribute spread sheet

This editor will allow you to set the tesselation on all your nurbs objects in a single place.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Rick M