Does X7 have a better 3D feature yet similar to Adobe Illustrator?

>3D in Coreldraw is very dated and primitive...

Compared to what? Illustrator's 3D Effect? Again, this is comparing apples to oranges.

Draw's Extrude tool and its perspective options are cleanly done, and are arguably more appropriate to a 2D drawing program. They are entirely 2D constructs, and I actually prefer seeing things like that for the primary purpose of building vector drawings.

Example:

Does everyone here understand this about Illustrator's 3D Effect?:

• Yes, it can map artwork stored as Symbols onto the surfaces of the 3D model. But...
• What's considered a "surface" is the extrusion/lathe of a path segment. So you can't, for example, wrap that mapping around the corners of a cube. For that appearance, you have to slice and dice the mapped artwork and map the pieces individually to each side of the cube.
• Mapping of artwork to spheres (revolved semicircles) is limited to Meratorial projection. The artwork is always "pinched" to a single point at the poles of the sphere. This is a frequent topic of confusion in the Adobe Illustrator forums where users are trying to get some other kind of uniform mapping, like that of dimples on a golf ball.
• One of the potentially most useful aspects of 3D Effect is turning off the visibility of the model itself in order to save time in doing convincing 3D distortions of 2D artwork. But such uses are often frustrated by 3D Effect's insistence on outlining all strokes contained in the mapped artwork. It even does this in its flat-surface Rotate (as opposed to Revolve) variation, making it useless for many practical things you might want to employ for 2D illustration. For such uses, Draw's Extrude tool is actually more efficient.
• 3D Effect is limited to extrusion and lathing. It can't, for example, do pipeline sweep (extrusion along a curve).

So again; yes, a built-in basic 3D modeling module is one potential area for competing with Illustrator. But Illustrator's 3D Effect is not the target to emulate in "me, too" fashion. If that were to be pursued by Corel, I certainly hope the goal would be to exceed it, not match it.

But moreover, I don't really consider the absence of such a thing a competitive disadvantage for a program that is, after all, a 2D drawing program. I'd much rather my preferred 2D drawing program be much more sophisticated than Illustrator in 2D drawing.

The proper Illustrator comparison to Draw's Extrude tool is not Illustrator's 3D Effect; it's Illustrator's "perspective" behavior of its Free Distort tool and its Free Distort Effect, both of which are quite inferior.

JET