As asked above really? Is there a way to do this easily or is it necessary to do all the teeth independantly. Any help appreciated.

I'm not sure if you would consider any ot these the long way round / easy way to do it! but I would tend to do the first option.

Opt 1:
Create a cylinder,
Select every 2nd face
press e to extrude, but don't extrude to any great distance,
press s to scale and scale out the gear teeth - the teeth ends will now be way too big
switch to a side view press s to scale followed by x y or z to limit the scale along the axis of the cylinder and scale the width of the teeth down
tweak the rest of the scaling on the teeth end to give a gear.

Opt 2:
Create a nurbs curve in the cross section shape of the gear wheel
extrude
convert to mesh

(not sure if the steps are exact for opt 2 haven't played with nurbs / splines much in blender yet - but it'd work fine in Max...)

Hope that helps with the idea - tweak the number of sides / size of teeth etc...

forgot to mention when you do the extrude select the 'face' rather then 'region' option....

That's pretty much the way I expected to do it really. I asked because I came across a tutorial for one of the higher end applications that had a modifier that would do the job in one go. I believe it was called sub-D or somesuch although I can't remember which app it was. Just wondered if Blender had something similar as I haven't really played with its modifiers much.

I would use curves to create a single triangle at one point and extrude that back. Then use whatever Blender has in the way of an array function to complete the gear.

You could model one tooth and do a 'SpinDup'  ( I think is the right one.)

Quote - You could model one tooth and do a 'SpinDup'  ( I think is the right one.)

Now thats a method I never thought of! For what I want to do that does sound a better option.

Here are two scripts for gears: I have seen good comments on the second one but never used either myself.[

http://www.len.ro/work/blender](http://www.len.ro/work/blender)

http://www.selleri.org/Blender/scripts/text.html

Thanks for those. The second one definitely looks the more promising, although it may produce more detailed gear (read no. of verts)than I need to use. Definitely a keeper though.

Quote - Thanks for those. The second one definitely looks the more promising, although it may produce more detailed gear (read no. of verts)than I need to use. Definitely a keeper though.

How about using the 'Optimize' script? Hmm?