Nowaday, rapid product development (RPD) becomes a crucial approach for the success of a company in a competitive market when the complexity and diversity of products keep increasing while their lifetimes are getting shorter and shorter. Freehand sketch is a tool that is closer and more practical for customer to communicate his/her ideas to manufacturer. The sketch is typically transformed to be a 3D model for technologies such as rapid prototyping where a physical prototype is fabricated from a 3D model. Presented in this paper is a review of sketch-based modeling that allows customers-manufacturers to speed up the idea realization. Sketch-based modeling has been developed not only to transform a sketch to be a 3D model but also to interface with rapid prototyping.