Proper Way To Model Environments?

Since the majority of the renders and drawings I have seen on here have been houses, buildings etc it got me wondering how you guys model these things. Coming from a mainly mechanical setting all my designs/drawings tend to be solids. Just peeking through your tutorials i noticed one drawing, a table, using close p-lines and thickening them and creating patches for the ends of the open boxes. Is it common place for your designs to be surface models like this?

for instance i drew this table earlier today thinking about another post on rendering cabinets. The table is solid. I created profiles and revolved it to make "inlays". Of course this could have been done with revsurf instead of revolve. I also made note of someone saying these "skins" use less memory which would make sense for larger files like houses or buildings. i also understand that surface modeling will give you the ability to smooth out etc.

I dont ever for see a transition into this industry but i was just kind of curious as to how you guys model these environments. I realize there is probably not a right/wrong way to do it as long as you achieve the same effect.

thanks

I use Autocad Architectures AEC objects. Pull in mesh objects from 3ds files for the furniture and what not.

so you dont draw anything? im not sure i understand.

I seldom use surfaces. Not sure why. Maybe its because I deal mainly with steel for fabricating platforms, supports and railings as well as tanks, reactors, condensers, receivers and decanters. Now, if I were modeling household/consumer goods or cars or freeblown glassware it might be different.

do you happen to have any idea how they take say a surface model of a car and take into into an actual sheet metal piece. I would really like to learn the proper way to model cars and motorcycles(body parts). The solids i dont have a problem with(i dont think:))

I have used a faro arm and modeled using Point Clouds as references but again this is only a surface model. Ive actually dont a little work for one of the large tractor/trailer companies and they sent me a partial model of their interior and everything was modeled as it is in reality as far as i can tell.

thanks

so you dont draw anything? im not sure i understand.

The AEC objects in Autocad Architecture are naturally 3'd, so there is very little work to do to actually bring the model into a renderable enviroment.