> Manifold tool= yup, that's the one I was thinking of.
It might be a little while... You can accomplish the same thing by using Trim and then Join right now. Before adding a new tool, I would prefer to wait for a while and think about ways that it could be incorporated into an existing tool.
> I assume there will be option to import background reference images
Yes, this should be coming pretty soon.
> but what about the option to "sketch" within MOI?
Do you mean as in a paint program with airbrush paint styles, etc? Or do you mean freeform curve sketching?
The first (bitmap style painting) will be quite difficult, it is a very large area of work that is very different than the current CAD / Vector graphics style stuff that MoI currently uses. So not anytime soon for that.
For sketching curves as if by brush strokes, that is available now, go to Draw curve / Freeform / Sketch. You may find the "Repeat" checkbox to be useful to do many strokes.
> Also, is there a way to create/edit geometry the way Sketch up does?
Currently no, there isn't any way to directly draw on objects. I have some ideas for exploring this in the future, but it will be a while before there is any work done on it. I would kind of like to avoid having a special tool to just draw only freeform curves on surfaces, it would be better if there was a way to tag a surface and then have all the drawing tools work on it. But of course having all the tools work on it will be a lot harder to accomplish.
But in many instances instead of rushing a half-way solution out, I would kind of rather be without it entirely for a while until the whole solution can be brought in properly all at once. This approach does mean that I will be missing big chunks of stuff for a while. Some stuff that is pretty weird to be missing too, like changing object properties or having layers...
> I know nothing about what it takes to create an application so
> forgive me if I'm saying things are way complicated.
No problem, it never hurts to ask! :) Some of the stuff you're asking for is indeed rather complex, such as blending features for 5 different apps together! :)
It's great to get feedback on these ideas and about the type of flavor of tools that would be useful. I've had ideas on future work along the same lines as stuff that you are requesting. But some of these will take quite a while before they can come to fruition, though. In the closer future it will only be feasible to make much smaller steps.
There's also another problem, in that it may not be a possible task to jam too much stuff into one single tool and maintain the same clarity and ease of use, those goals are unfortunately fairly fundamentally at odds with one another.
- Michael
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