Tl Dr: the shape of the gear tooth is the result of the gear cutting tool and the process involved in cutting gears. Then they're gonna use a tool based on gear specs and not the geometry. If you don't have a shop to do that, then you'll have to source the work to a shop that does. Whereas if you're doing this because you don't trust solidworks or you don't think you can get what you want from solidworks or other online resources, you're eventually gonna need gear cutting tools and that's just gonna be a pain. Therefore if you're doing this to learn great but eventually it'll weigh you down.
So it's not really a gear unless you use a gear cutting tool. A 2d CNC router may be able to trace that profile, but it won't produce the machining results of a gear cutting tool. While it may be possible to use a waterjet or a CNC router or a 3d printer or even an injection molding machine to simply cut a 2d profile, in truth that profile is the result of the machining process. Why ? Because the true shape of a gear tooth is the result of the tool used in the machining process.
In general, like screws and bearings you can select certain standard gear specs to be used in a wide variety of applications, and if you use a vendor when making that selection they'll also provide you with strength and other useful engineering specsĮven when you have a uniquely distinct design intent in mind you can still use cad software or other online resources to achieve your results You can also go online and use calculators or websites like grabcad, McMaster or to simply select options from a list However for all intents and purposes you can either use the native solidworks gear design module or any other cad program version of that (I forget most of the names but in general these are design modules in the software). It may indeed be a similarly good learning experience to get comfortable with all the calculations Welp, ok it may be a good learning experience to try and model gears on your own