Hello and welcome to another CAD clip on AutoCAD 2007 3D and we are talking a lot about solids and surfaces and thickness and stuff like that. Now, in the past, we used a lot of surfaces in AutoCAD and we used 3D phases and we give objects thickness I am finding more and more now that all our solids are here and we have all these great tools. I am using more solids than I am adding thickness and what I am talking about with thickness. Here, I just have a circle that has got some color. This is a close to poly line that has filleted corners and I can even just you know draw a line over here, it does not matter. Go look at that in 3D. Any object can be given--if a line is given thickness, it just kind of springs up from there and after that you can kind of move it around and stuff like that but it is a line that has vertical thickness so it goes up in the zed direction.

You can do the same thing. I am just undoing here. You can do then same thing with closed poly lines and circles. We have always been able to do that or I can click on a circle and say thickness is 15 units and it goes up by 15 units so I can click on this closed poly line and it is a closed poly line. I can even see that by going down here and it says closed and I am going to give this one a thickness of 20 units and it just springs up from there. Okay if I look at that in a hidden line with a Shift middle mouse button, it looks like that and if I look at it in my conceptual view, it is kind of like a fence in a sense. It just has springs up with zed thickness. So this tool we are talking about here which is convert to solid in this particular lesson convert to solid, this tool is specifically designed to take objects that have thickness and convert those to solids. For whatever reason you have to use whatever tools you have in here and they have given us the ability to kind of move back and forth between objects with thickness and surfaces and then back to or I should say the solids and then back to surfaces and go full circle. You can kind of mishmash all of your different primitives together depending on what the geometry is. So, very straight forward, we go here and we say convert to solid.

Now, remember if I hit F1 right now and go to my help menu, there it is right there. If you hit F1 in the middle of a command, it always jumps to that particular command and you can see the real command is convert to solid and it says here converts poly lines and circles with thickness to 3D solids. Basically that is what it is. You can have another look at that so converts circles and poly lines that have a thickness to be 3D solids so it goes very quickly. We go convert to solid, click on here, enter, done. Convert to solid, click on here, enter and you are done.

Move that over. Move it back and that is about it converts those objects to solids. I always find it interesting to do a list command. LI for list and list it before and after I do the conversion just to see what it tells me it is. It is an extrusion now, converted it to a 3D solid extrusion so I always am constantly listing these objects to see what it converts them back and forth from.

And another note I should mention is a set bar called DELOBJ. I do not know if that shows up in a dialogue box somewhere. Delete object is exiting where if you set it to be one which is the default what happens when it does these conversions, it deletes the original object which is what we did here. If I move this, the original circle is gone and if I move that, the poly lines gone okay.

If I draw another line poly line over here and C for close. I take that and I give that a thickness of 10, enter and maybe give it a different color just for fun. Now, watch what happens. I am going to use my arrow key to scroll back to my DELOBJ command, enter, change it to be zero enter, and now when I do my convert to solid and click on here and enter, it creates that solid. I am going to say M for move, L for last which means last object created and there is my original poly line left behind. So, DELOBJ, delete object is a variable that will set on or off switch, one deletes it, zero does not delete the object and you will see that throughout some of these different conversions. Wherever you lose your original geometry chances are that DELOBJ may be playing a part.