Hi Nariman, I am very happy that MoI is working for you as a way to start using CAD! That is very motivating for me to hear!

> I do not feel comfortable having to go back to picking the tool each
> time I make a new stroke, especially when freehand sketching.

Here is what you can do - after you start the Sketch tool, look at the option area in the upper-right corner. There is a "Repeat" checkbox at the bottom of it - if you check this box, then the freehand sketch tool will automatically repeat after each stroke, so that will allow you to make many strokes without having to pick the tool over and over again. This works for any of the other drawing tools too.




Another way is if you right-click (which is kind of annoying with the pen though, there is usually a side-button for that) inside a viewport after a command is finished, you will repeat the last used command.


> An ability to remove that detritus with an eraser (rather than going backward and
> forwards to the trimming process), would be SO nice!

This is a very interesting idea... Typically CAD and vector graphics programs (for instance Adobe Illustrator) don't work like this, usually only bitmap-based programs work in this manner.

There are a few technical difficulties with doing it, handling a real "scribbling" eraser type would involve some new concepts that are not currently in MoI, such as a kind of brush size.

I think it will be difficult enough that I won't be able to do it right away, but I will try to think about it. I have some other ideas on sketching tools that I would like to explore in the future also.


In the meantime, this kind of scribbling and erasing type drawing really works better in a Bitmap-based application than in a structured-object-generating CAD application.

Have you experimented with some other bitmap-based graphics tools?

Here is a really interesting one that works well with a tablet: http://artrage.com/ , there is a free version that is quite useful, and the full version is ridiculously cheap. It is really quite friendly for tablet use. Another similar one is "Autodesk SketchBook Pro": http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?id=6848332&siteID=123112 (used to be called Alias Sketchbook).

Both of these are very pencil-like sketching tools, they are far closer to real pencil drawing than MoI, and they are both pretty easy to use. But they are bitmap-based programs, so their output is a bunch of dots ("pixels") in a bitmap file like a .jpg , it doesn't produce structured objects like MoI.

I'm working on making the next beta to have the ability to bring in bitmaps so you can use them as a guide when drawing curves inside of MoI. So at that point what you could do is use ArtRage to do some free pencil sketching, and then when you have your sketch done, bring that into MoI as a background guide and draw some curves to use for the actual model construction.


Of course it would be cool if MoI had more sketch/scribble like mechanisms in it, and I would like to add that in over time. But there is a bit of a clash between CAD-accuracy type flavor and sketching/scribbling type flavor to a certain extent.

Anyway, it is really great to hear that MoI is working for you!

- Michael