Hello and welcome to another AutoCAD 2007 CAD clip talking about AutoCAD 3D. I am just kind of continuing along with our surfaces, lastly we talked about a plainer surface. We have also got a thicken surface and all I have done here is I have changed the color of this objects just in a properties, these solid objects which is the resultant. Now, this one is an extruded surface and this one is a thickened surface and I am just going to erase these guys.

There is also was setting called DELOBJ and that is a set bar that you can set so that when you create these thicken surfaces and extrude it, you retain the original geometry and that has been set to zero which is why I was able to erase the solids and then be left with those surfaces so I am just going to switch hack to be a 2D wire frame and go back to my top view.

All I have got here is two surfaces that have created plainer surfaces using my plainer surface tool over here and they have different mesh densities but that is okay so now what I am going to talk about is the thicken surface here so I am going to go with 3D view and again nothing really fancy about our thicken surface. All it does has take a surface that is plainer and makes it thicker and you can give it a number. I find that the extrusion gives us a better result and you can also taper here it so yet to discover all the nuances between the different geometry that is created. Visually it looks the same but I am sure somewhere down the line, I will discover the differences. So, I am going to start by using my thickened surface and I am going to read my command line. It says simply says select surfaces to thicken so I am going to pick on a surface and hit enter. It is going to ask me for a thickness, I am going to type in a number like 10, a relative coordinate and hit enter and I am done.

Okay I can go back and look at that in my different views here and my visual styles. And then what I always do is I list it, list this object, it is a 3D solid and history bounding backs etc., So, that was a plainer surface that was given thickness by using the--I am going to use my shift middle mouse button here. So, now I can take that 3D solid and maybe move it over there to the side.

Now, I am going to compare that to the extrude. Extrude, I can extrude a surface, I am going to hit enter. I am going to set T for taper. I am going to set a tapering angle of 12 degrees and then I am going to give—it says specify height, I will say 15, enter and it will taper it or I could have not tapered it. Okay let us move that over to the side, let us try it again.

Extrude, this is as much of an extrusion lesson as a thicken surface. Pick on here enter and I am going to say taper angle, T enter of zero and then a height as I move up of 10, so this is an extruded one and this was a thickened surface one. Visually they look the same, I list this enter okay and I list this enter okay, there is the two of them. They are both 3D solids. One is an extrusion solid type. This one does not tell you what solid type it is, little bit different. So, what I always do to try to compare is I will list them and see if there is a difference there.

So really the only difference is this an extrusion and the one that use to thicken surfaces is not an extrusion and somewhere in there, I am sure there is some boundaries that will make them work differently but my point here being is I can use the thicken surface, pick on here, give a surface thickness of 8 or whatever I want and it is done or I can extrude it. Visually, they look the same, but this is a surface that has been thickened and also notice, I use a shift middle mouse button. When you do an extrusion, you still have a nice grip where you can extrude these up and down. These ones have these beautiful grips. If you do thicken surface then you cannot change it, perhaps you can go in and changed the thickness in the properties let us see.

Click on here, go to my properties, material, shadow casting etc. so I am not sold on this thickened surface. I am not sure where I would use this, where it would have a