Feature ideas maybe...

 From:  Michael Gibson
5387.2 In reply to 5387.1 
Hi Felix, I haven't had a chance to watch the whole video yet, maybe if you could include the particular time at which each of your points occur that would let me see what you're describing without having to watch through the entire video first.

re: #1 - you can get a view looking straight down a surface normal using the View > CPlane tool in MoI - when you place a cplane the "Top" view in moi will be looking exactly down on it. It's only a 2 click process to place a cplane - an initial click to place the base point and then you can adjust the orientation of how you want to be twisted around that normal (by like banking left or right) or if the default banking is fine then do a right click to accept that placement and you'll be done.

re: Fill - yup I definitely want to add in an N-sided blend mechanism into MoI that I think is what you're referring to there. It's unfortunately a pretty finicky area to get working well so I'm not quite sure exactly when it will happen but it's certainly on my list.

re: various constraints - I'd love to add those in as well, however they will involve a considerable amount of additional UI systems that are required to manipulate them. Things that involve a lot of new UI will tend to be slow to get added into MoI since it's very easy for large amounts of UI to also introduce complexity and "bloat", and have a lot of potential to turn MoI from a light and easy to use tool into a complex and difficult to use program. Keeping that "light and easy to learn" overall feel is a very important goal for MoI so things that require a lot of complexity to manage are not an instant easy fit with MoI, it requires a huge amount of design time for me to try and figure out good ways of integrating such elaborate things while not adding too much complexity.

So those kinds of things may be possible at some point in the future but some of those are rather farther off.

N-sided blend will probably be one of the sooner ones than constraints, because I think it can be added as just one new command so it should not introduce a lot of UI bloat.

SolidWorks as a whole has a big system in place for building and editing constraints, and I think some of the features that you are referring to go along with that entire system - basically those ones are much more difficult to add into MoI without adding in a corresponding overall large system of editing them. That focus in SolidWorks of building things in a "feature tree" manner has a big impact on the overall workflow, one of the things that's nice about MoI is that it has a very light and fluid workflow and basically lets you just freely draw and you don't always have to be going through as many preparation steps in order to do things.

- Michael

EDITED: 12 Sep 2012 by MICHAEL GIBSON