Hello,

I think MoI is a valuable tool to have in your toolkit for vehicle designs. If you happen to have Rhino you could try out AD Shape Modeling for Rhino which provides the sort of tools you need for automotive design. It's $1300 but it beats the $40K bill for Autostudio. In fact their downloadable tutorial deals specifically with automotive surfacing, it's a good exercise. You could also look into Tsplines for your conceptual work before surfacing using something like ADSM. Even reverse engineering tools like M2S for Rhino allow you to build up your NURBS model from scan or mesh data. I still haven't found a streamlined interface than MoI, even if you're performing some operations in Rhino to fill in the gaps one is perfectly capable of creating these sorts of models in NURBS.