Need help with a gear.

I know, not a very good looking gear. Don't have to be.

My problem is the center circle is a hole. How do I make it clear?

The outer circles are indentions, 1.5MM deep. How do I make them show?

TIA,

dlw

I have moved your question to the 3D Modeling section: http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?20-AutoCAD-3D-Modelling-amp-Rendering

It looks like you created this gear using Surfaces instead of creating it as a Solid. Any reason for that?

This video may be helpful: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/community/screencast/728c2026-4c13-4e05-950a-99eda1111407

Lots more videos here: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=autocad+3d+gear

I think your gear would be better if it were a solid and not a surface. Assuming your gear profile was constructed of lines and small segments of arcs you should have used the PRESSPULL command as it will work on lines, polylines, arcs, and splines. Some users will create a profile using a single, continuous, polyline in which case they can use the EXTRUDE command to get the height.

If you haven't used REGIONS to create the gear then you have two options for creating the hole. The first is to use PRESSPULL to press or pull a circle through the gear. The second option would be to extrude a circle thus creating a cylinder then subtracting the cylinder from the gear.

As for the indented holes a circle can be extruded to a shallow depth and then subtracted or one can use the PRESSPULL command and type in the depth at the command line.

I think you need to read up on all the various 3D commands to get a feeling for what they can do before proceeding any further. This would also include the 3D editing commands like Move Faces for example. You want to also learn about such commands as EXTRUDE, LOFT and PRESSPULL and see what the differences between them are.

dlw: How did your gear drawing finally turn out? Were you able to create a solid model?

An example of a gear that I created. In the first image the 2D geometry is on the far left. I used the REGION command on this geometry which resulted in 6 regions (5 of which were the circles). I then subtracted the circles from the remainder of the gear (middle gear). Finally I used the PRESSPULL command to give it height. This resulted in a 3D solid model as seen on the far right. The visual style is 2D Wireframe.

Now compare the above image to the one below. In this case I used a Shades of Gray visual style.