1. I model everything in polygons. I'm just so used to working with polys and there's rarely ever a need for me to use nurbs. I know that games pretty much use polys but I was told by a university that for movies, you model everything in NURBS. I didn't realize that. Is that really true?

I find working with nurbs VERY annoying for me because the surfaces are all separate. A poly cube is 1 object but a nurbs cube is 4 objects (4 detached sides). My passion is definitely toward movies and not games. Should I be modeling everything in NURBS? If so, why are movies modeled with NURBS? I havn't experimented but I assumed that NURBS takes longer to render because of the computations it has to do. Perhaps I've been wrong all this time.

2. On another subject, where or how do I find out naming conventions for using Maya? What I mean is when I name objects and materials and such in my scenes, what's the standard way of naming things?

edit: I name materials as mat_<name>. I name layers as lyr_<name>. I name objects <name>. Is there a preferred way?