There are a lot of edge cases to work out, and a lot of policies to figure out. But, it works well as-is, from what we can tell, so we wanted to throw it out there before the weekend.
I’ve only tried a couple of things and I’m not sure what to expect. I was under the impression that nesting would move my objects around and rearrange them in the most efficient (material-wise) arrangement…but my initial results seem random. I’m likely missing something.
I googled “Nesting in CAD” and got some background…so I’m not completely blind…but here’s what I tried and what I got - and I’m not sure why:
So just been testing out the Nesting function - which is really neat & could definitely make it easier for arranging parts across stock. But just wondering about how it’s designed to function…specifically, is it supposed to respect vectors that are grouped together?
So besides the fact that it overlapped closed vectors, it took vectors that were part of the inside of the numbers on the pieces & put them elsewhere even though they were grouped together beforehand.
Open vectors do not get placed unless they overlap a closed vector- under the assumption that they are meant to be some other feature to be machined as part of the closed vector.
We haven’t tried a group of all open vectors, so that might be a failure. If you don’t mind posting the file, we’ll look into it.
Interesting that running the function with the same file twice yielded very different results. The only difference was not making copies of the objects.
I also ran it a third time and got yet another result — I didn’t save it, but it was jumbled as well,.,…a different way - I’ll try to reproduce that one.
OK…was able to recreate the third instance. Ran it like the first example, did an UNDO to get back to the original file, then ran it again with exactly the same parameters and got:
Yes, it certainly seems to throw the function off into a fray.
Some letter outlines I was playing with earlier seemed to work quite nicely - but the font was a very square/rectangular style.
That’s an interesting file, which really only seems to have very few solutions. I’m not sure if adding a “Try really hard” option to spend move compute time would find this exact solution. We’ll start a “bad nest” sample directory to test these when the feature stabilizes more.
But as-is, to have a sensible output, you need to have these settings:
The inner lettering will be marked as separate vectors to nest, so unchecking “Treat inner vectors as hoes” keeps them together.
Since the source vectors are already in the job space, it’s better to uncheck the “Create copies” option so you don’t have the original and new vectors on top of one another.
I think that’s always the polite thing to do, @robgrz .
Since I have the mike, I’ll say that I’m not a woodworker, but my first thought upon seeing the nesting was “if I were a woodworker I’d want a checkbox to respect grain orientation” --i.e. translate but not rotate the vectors…
I think with complex vectors such as these, it would be handy to just have a function to space them apart by a set amount in either X or Y. The most tedius part of making an arrangement is ensuring a minimum space between the vectors for the endmill diameter. The Alignment function seems to almost has this capability.
