There's a bit of attention being paid to direct editing programs currently, with SpaceClaim, NX, CoCreate and others touting it as an alternative or adjunct to history-based modeling. I've been sampling CoCreate PE and found it quite difficult to get my head around. I'm glad it isn't time-limited, 'cos I think it's going to take me a while, despite the vendors implying that a mountain gorilla could learn it between bananas. But I've also been sampling another thing that's been around for quite some time - a program called Pilot3D. It spun out of a maritime program called ProSurf, and doesn't have that program's hydrostatics or other marine aspects, it concentrates purely on surfacing. It does polysurfaces with mixed offsets/thicknesses, and creates primitive solids that are watertight collections of associative surfaces. It exports them as IGES solids that are accepted as ACIS solids in VC. The interface is olde worlde, but the functionality is neat. It doesn't have feature recognition, which is what CoCreate and SpaceClaim use to advantage, but as a sampler for direct editing, it's a lot of fun. It's only USD 70, and if you can't justify that for fun (that's the cost of a lot of PS and Xbox games!), it's also got some good plate/sheet development ability. Worth a look, though Windows.

Interesting program, that Pilot3D. I just got ViaCAD Pro 6 and am liking some of it features more than my old Amapi Pro I used for NURBS. But VCP was pretty cheap already on Amazon.

I was going to have a look, but noticed (after taking a quick look around their forum) that the program needs to connect out to their servers every time it is started. For a free program, that is over the top for me.