Splines, Nurbs and Bézier curves?

Learning any new piece of software can be a daunting task. As a designer who has spent the best part of 20 years using Adobe’s Creative Suite, you find yourself using an ever-familiar layout of tools and menu items. Like muscle memory, these become second nature. Paths. Crop. Select. As designers, we all get to grips with these ever-familiar terms. So when I took on training for Cinema 4D, it came as some surprise to be faced with a whole new array of technical terms. Booleans. Splines. Nurbs. Hypernurbs. Bézier Curves. Bézier Nurbs. Bézier Splines even. These may sound like the kind of jargon you would expect to hear in a science fiction movie (“Activate the Hypernurb!”), but they are actually some the core elements to creating material in Cinema 4D. Bézier Splines, for example, is a method for creating soft, spatial curves. Hypernurbs, allow you to take geometric shapes and sculpt them into smooth, rounded objects. But why these strange names? Where did they come from?