Thanks Steve - I take comfort from your guarded words! I was thinking that the old solid types could remain, 'under the hood', but MS get clever enough to largely hide that, in use. A single modification tool would offer the full range of modification modes in all cases: if unavoidable, makes-no-sense modes wd be greyed out depending on the 'under the hood' solid type being modified: but wherever possible every modification mode wd be allowed even if it would 'break' that Form or Solid type, resulting in its demotion to another type. When that occurred, an informative message wd describe exactly what aspect of the modification was disallowable e.g. 'A LinearForm cannot have non parallel sides, so this modification will demote to FreeForm - confirm or cancel? This (with surly uninformative message) happens whenever the wonderful versatile reliable PushPull tool is used on a LinearForm - it demotes (often unneccessarily) to SmartSolid, So the engine is capable of transforming between different geometry-description formats, on the fly. Tho I'd have thought the underlying engine wd describe all geometries in a unified way, and the apparent differences between Form and Solid types are just abstractions for the purposes of creation routine and of parametric revision. Another aspect is that certain modifications can be made e.g. to slice and dice LinearForms by Cut Solid by Curve, which are impossible to achieve by the standard Mitre, L, T and Modify Form tools - but which still then report as un-demoted LinearForms. So that modification was not disallowable, just that the standard tools are full of fussy refusals to do useful things. E.g. making Mitre or L joints not just between ends of LinearForms, but between sides, tops and bottoms, in any mixed combination. Another great one wd be to allow all Forms and Solids to be Extended and/or Trimmed to another Form, Solid, Surface, Shape or even Line/Curve etc, almost as readily as 2D elements are. I'm astonished that it's not possible to Extend or even drag a Line end and have it snap to a Solid's face or to a Surface - but have to longwindedly create the intersection first. If that can be done 'manually', why not automatically? In general, Direct Modeling is the coming thing and Bentley does need to catch up the others. Though History-like Features are proving v useful. As a newby I don't know how such SRs should be phrased or whether I should ask an insider to sponsor it, or whatever.
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