Michael:

Thanks for your thorough reply. Regarding the masking of trimmed surfaces, I momentarily forgot about that (um, very fundamental) aspect of NURBS modeling and how it might impact the implementation of enhanced sub-object control over larger objects. Also, I can't recall if the Maya deformers operate on NURBS geometry-- though I think they must--or only poly-meshes and subdivision surfaces...

Anyway, I appreciate what you suggest about sketching as "drawing" vs. sketching as "sculpting"... But I think that sculpting in a 3D-modeling environment is hard to avoid, especially when dealing with "freeform" and "organic" shapes. :^) The funny thing about Sketchup is that while it threads the drawing metaphor completely through the interface, the "Push/Pull" command combined with the ability to dynamically subdivide/add detail to surfaces leads to a way of modeling that is not drawing-like at all!

Now that I've mentioned Sketchup, I will say that I love that one can make a "component" which has the ability to recognize and reorient to faces as well as boolean automatically when placed. If something like that ever happened in a complex surface modeling environment like Moi...well, now that would be pretty jaw-dropping! (I can only imagine how difficult that would be to implement however...)

On a much simpler note, I also feel that it might be nice if the "Esc" key (which I have programmed as one of my tablet buttons) cleared any current selections much like it cancels out of a command. (Now that I'm almost certain is one line of code that can go in the *.ini file...?!)

Anyway, thanks for creating such a nice app; I'm enjoying exploring the software and particularly like the Shell tool.

Best, Justin