To me what the Wings team needs to concentrate on is the realtime sub-D manipulation. Its very painful currently. But other than that I’m a wings guy through and through.

Second Eric just in the 7 years that i use wings3D many people add that same complaints, “why wings don’t have widgets”, “why wings don’t have icons for the tools”, etc, etc. And the same reply i will give here wings don’t need widgets, first because they are tricky to implement because of the particular way wings was initially made and second because wings3D is very keyshortcuts based, thats why is easy to assign keys to the various wings tools. About the icons the majority of the wings3D users like the simple look of the right clicking context sensitive menus in wings, and so don’t want the developers to fill the UI with icons. If you want a icon based 3D app them just use Truespace it is also free. The UI will one day be updated but for now the developers are working in more important things like making Wings3D faster.

In it’s current state, wings is nice, but it has some serious problems and I was a little disappointed to hear that they aren’t going to be adressed
1) No manipulators. This makes the work flow feel very clunky compared to just about any other modeller because you are constantly moving your view around and trying to get an idea of which axis is which way.

2) The UI is a bit of an eyesore. It seriously reminds me of the first time I saw linux. The hard edged menus are the worst part.

3) Most modellers have features like widgets and options bars that let you adjust the effects of a tool interactively in real time. Wings’s approach to this is clunky to say the least. With most tools, you navigate through a lengthy series of sub menus and if you don’t like it, you have to undo and repeat the entire thing over again.

4) Most modelers add a few, very flexible tools (Modo is the best example), but wings is currently filling up it’s context menus with lots of very specific, limited tools. That’s another issue. Currently, there are so many options, that right clicking on the wrong place, can result in many of the options spilling off screen. Many menus also have a “more” option which just makes this worse. Robust it is not. Some serious thought needs to be put into how the UI organisation is going to change with all the tools being shoved into the context menus.

5) As a program meant for digital art, wings feels too informational and not visual enough. When you right click to bring up your tools, you are presented with a jumble of text. Not exactly an enjoyable experience.

To be honest, wings feels too much like it was designed by coders for coders, rather than for artists.

Cheers -
Dave