This video show the “paperdoll” technique for making subd parts. It’s super useful and simple if you are just dipping your toe in to subd awesomeness.
give it a rip and let me know how it goes!
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Thanks for the tutorial. So new to to this so really good to see peoples Sub-D process. There is something not quite right for my set up though. I am working on Mac WIP version 7.0.20091.16036 but the Tab doesn’t work for 3d faces until after they are drawn. They are always smooth during the drawing phase. As soon as I hit enter to confirm the 3d face it switches to box mode. Maybe I missed something?
Watching the beginning of this.
A way to save a lot of time:
-Select all the red quads.
_PlanarSrf
_SelSrf
_Mesh
_addNgonsToMesh
_toSubD
_Join
And I bet someone else who knows Rhino better than me could reduce the number of commands above by at least one.
nice! That’s why I put this stuff out there, so you all can go and improve on it! 
can you show the result of your technique? I’m interested to see the topology.
The goal of that video was to show a simple technique to folks with zero sub d experience.
As long as you start with closed planar polylines, it should give you a result just like the flat SubD you have before you extrude in your video.
All the sequence of commands does is take make the polylines into subD faces and join them into one subD object.
The video is very useful and instructive in gumball technique and sculpting, I’m just offering a shortcut that gets through the first part fast.
the _mesh, _addNgonsToMesh, _toSubD sequence is also fun to use on any solid that has only planar faces.
You can also use _addNgonsToMesh followed by _toSubD on mesh polyhedra from the Rhino Polyhedra plugin and get some very fun results that are often good jumping off points for other ideas.
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nice, please post some images! I’d love to see the stuff you’re making with Subd!
Here’s an example of what you can get by using Rhino Polyhedra as the basis for 3d patterns and then converting them to SubD. In this case, I’m using polyhedra with faces that have shapes not commonly used in SubD objects. I thought I might be able to break SubD by piling up non-convex mesh faces, but they work fine. Occasionally I’ll run into self-intersections, but mostly I seem to be stumbling on interesting forms that use an efficient number of faces.
Rhino 6 file below. (open in the latest Rhino 7 WIP to be able to use all subD features, particularly the smooth to faceted view toggle, which will show you how the faces work. In Rhino 6, use _ExtractControlPolygon to see the source mesh)
: polyhedra to subD example.3dm (385.4 KB)
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take THAT nurbs! 
very well done, thanks for sharing!