In this paper, a method for 3-D shapes modeling which has hierarchical structure is proposed. For representing 3-D surface shapes, fourth order non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) functions with controllable knots are employed as the surface model. Consequently, a multiresolution representation technique based on multiresolution wavelet transform can be implemented with the corresponding B-wavelets. The surface models at each resolution level are obtained by performing a decomposition algorithm, after the surface model at the highest level is estimated. In order to estimate the surface model as accurately as possible, an iterative algorithm solves a regularization problem. Through several experiments using real data of range images, the effectiveness of the proposed method has been confirmed.