New interface approaches and some insightful new technology are stimulating a rebirth of "Direct Geometry Editing." What had in the past been called explicit geometry and thought to be passé with the advent of parametric history-based CAD more than two decades ago is back with a vengeance.

To be accurate – the rebirth is not so much in the creation of model geometry, but in editing techniques used to modify existing data, whether parametrically generated or not. In 2007, there is a resurgence of direct geometry edit functions being offered across the industry in almost every major CAD application. The positives and negatives of when to use one approach over the other, especially in a CAD application that remains fundamentally a parametric history-based modeler, will likely become a raging topic throughout the industry over the next year. Number of pages in report, 5.