I would model this in SubD if I were you.
That way you can tweak the entire skin to your liking.
And you can convert it to Nurbs for boolean operations when the shape is completed.
You can see and example model of a complex organic shape I made here:
There are some bits and pieces from the modelling shown in this thread.
Basically you think of a SubD shape as a 3 dimensional Nurbs Curve.
So if you follow the same rules for placing the controlpoints then you can get some really smooth yet detailed shapes from little input.
Rule of thumb(s):
- Try to keep it quad based.
- Keep it as simple as possible
- Model in box mode and keep the boxmode as clean as possible. (junk in = junk out)
- Ask many questions here
Here you can see the biggest part, it is all one “shell”.
And here is that part if you want to study it:
dino_part.3dm (457.0 KB)