I'm here, like several others, because of Google's SoC. I am a Master's student in Mechanical Engineering at Southern Methodist University. I have kept an eye on Inkscape for several years, but I have only rarely had occasion to use it. I, like everyone else here (it seems), am interested in adding facilities that will make Inkscape easier to use to make 3D drawings. Being an engineer, I am also interested in being able to use it to make orthographic drawings. Aside from the 3D box tool, there are several features that might prove useful for 3D drawing:
1) Isometric/Axiometric grid 2) Diagonal guides (converging to a vanishing point) 3) Drawing with a prespecified transformation 4) Make Ctrl-dragging a node observe the object's transformation matrix 5) Perspective transformation (this would require somehow extending SVG's transformation mechanism) 6) Support for snapping non-node corners of rectangles
I would be happy to work on any of these features over the summer. The usefulness of the first two seem obvious (to me), but the rest may take some explaining. Being able to set a transformation before you start drawing would allow you to, for example, set up drawing top faces for an isometric drawing, and have the rectangle tool work properly for those faces. Similarly, it would be useful to have a convenient way to move a node only along the basis vectors of an object's coordinate space, thus moving horizontally and vertically in the conceptual image. In conjunction with the previous two items, a perspective transformation would allow the same manipulations of orthographic images to be applied to perspective images. As for (6), this is usually taken care of by bounding-box snapping, but that doesn't work when the rectangle has undergone a transformation, making its corners not at the corners of its bounding box.
Also, for bug #1674596, would an acceptable replacement for "Export Bitmap..." be "Render to File..."? This seems like an ideal bug for me to figure out the patch submission process because the change is only one line (I think; I haven't been able to test it yet).
-- Eric Sumner