> this should also work for an aircraft front, side and plan views, yes ?

Sure, but the main focus of this program is character animation 
(although there are _NO_ animation features implemented yet! :-/ )
It's easy to model "organic" shapes, but it lacks some features needed 
to model e.g. architecture (and perhaps aircrafts too) - e.g. there's no 
CSG or something like that.

> perhaps you could explain 'rotoscopes' more fully

In classical animation, a rotoscope projected previously shot live 
action footage onto the animators drawing board, who could then simply 
trace the projected shape.
In CG a "rotoscope" is just another term for background image, and it's 
used for the same puropse.

> i've had a play with the beta, but i'm a total newbie with this program.
> what i have noticed is the seeming lack of functionality compared with 
> version 2.x.x

It's a complete rewrite, so it can't really be compared to version 0.2. 
I'm about to add the last missing features before "officially" going 
beta. If you're refering to the "add shapes" feature to create 
primitives like spheres, etc - This isn't implemented yet, but it isn't 
that important, because you can achieve the same effect easily by using 
the lathe or extrude tool.

If you're refering to the different "layers" - I've abandoned that 
concept - the new version allows to store an unlimited number of 
selections, and you can hide all unselected points now.

> what aspect of the beta do you particularly want looking at?

Firstly bugs :-( If it locks up, messes up something, a change isn't 
undoable, if it outputs any error messages (stack traces) on the 
console, etc.

This page shows known bugs and missing features (the features marked as 
"high priority" will be implemented in the "official" beta release)

http://www.jpatch.com/status.html

And of course any kind of feedback, ideas, feature requests, etc.

I've done some modeling to test it, here's my first try in modeling a 
head: http://www.jpatch.com/new/?page=gallery - it's done entirely with 
the latest development version and I haven't encountered any new bugs so 
far, but I'm almost sure that they are hidden somewhere :-)

> stephen

Thanks for taking your time!
-sascha

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