[Dylanear]

Depending on the version of Power Animator there are different tools for "blending" nurbs surfaces by generating "blend surfaces". But this was always problematic and a lot of work to get working well. You had to plan the topology of your nurbs well, then use Alias' tools to build procedural nurbs patches that blended other nurbs together based on curves on surface and various weighting and control parameters. These problems were the major reasons that subdivision surfaces (subDs) were developed in the late 90s. The big fx studios in the 90s had their own solutions. I believe ILM modeled in nurbs, but then converted to bezier surfaces for animating in Softimage. But I didn't work at ILM until late 2000 and I think everything was subDs by then? I never have done modeling or animation at ILM. I don't think Alias or Softimage was used at all at that point, Maya for modeling and animation, maybe softimage was still used for some animation?  We did lighting in a proprietary package called Irender. I did some character work in Nurbs in the 1994-1997 time frame and it was REALLY hard to get good blend surfaces and texture map them properly, not see stretching and creases when animated. Polygons didn't have the limitations of nurbs when it came to blending them into whole surfaces, but they had all the poly problems, faceting, texture mapping issues.

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I was thinking more about power animators "blend surfaces", but thinking back, the serious studios would break down a model with complex topology into many smaller nurbs (or simpler bezier) surfaces. Then used various tools to keep the edges "tangent" so you wouldn't see creases or gaps between them.

I don't see anything for Alias specifically, but this looks like it shows the concept and some implimentations in maya.

https://flylib.com/books/en/2.770.1.22/1/

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This doesn't answer your question at all, but it shows how subDs were developed to get around all the problems nurbs had in complex organic shapes and in animation/deformation. Hard to imagine Geri's Game was made WAY back in 1997, but I guess it was that long ago??

https://graphics.pixar.com/library/Geri/paper.pdf