[OPEN] Call for Feedback: Advanced Arrange Extension Preview

[javiar]

Hi all,

I am happy to introduce ‘Advanced Arrange’ as an Extension Preview. It unlocks additional capabilities for your Arrange tool. To try it, go to Preference > Preview Features and enable ‘Advanced Arrange’. @gregoryfowler  is my Experience Design counterpart on this project. 

With this enabled, your existing Arrange tool will allow multi-sheet arrangement and enable part rotation control. This means you can select multiple closed sketches/planar faces as arrangement boundaries or simply select a plane and provide length & width dimensions, and the Arrange tool will calculate the total number of sheets needed to arrange all selected components. Moreover, it also lets you specify the initial part orientation plus allowed part rotations in 90-degree increments. For example, if you need to arrange a part at 45 degrees to conform to material grain – set the orientation to 45 degrees and disable 90, 270 checkboxes for allowed rotation. This will arrange the part at 45 or 225 (i.e. 45 + 180) degrees counterclockwise from 0.

Additionally, we have also made some common improvements across Arrange and Advanced Arrange. There's now a 'Preview' toggle to selectively compute a preview for the modified parameters. This can help prevent any undesired auto-calculations while you're still modifying inputs. When arranging components using the 'Plane' method, the preview will also include dimension overlay and display sheet borders with appropriate frame width and sheet spacing.

Advanced Arrange extension preview is currently available to all users that have access to the Arrange tool (Student, Start-up, and paid subscriptions). For more details on Advanced Arrange, see Help Documentation.

Looking forward to hear your feedback on this Extension Preview.

Regards,

Ravi J

[fhirschOFP]

Ravi,

Looks great.   I realize you are looking for feature evaluations.   Can you give an idea of how this relates to the Nesting Extension.   Is this extension to be a kind of nesting "lite"?

Thanks 

[carl.j.barker]

Included with the nesting and fabrication extension.  So it's going to cost an extra £1800 (or £30 for the occasional nest) or so a year just to make laser cam viable for cutting brushed grain metalwork. I'll swap you the electronics nonsense for nesting.

[damien.huvelle]

I'm really disappointed, there will be no real solution for "nesting" if you don't pay a lot of money for it ... not asking for the nesting feature to be free but the "advanced arrange" ??? seriously ?

I'm agree with @carl.j.barker It is just a feature to make your CAM workspace VIABLE ...

I will probably reconsider my choise of sofware if it keeps going this way, and I don't think I will be the only one !

[Anonymous]

I tried this with a furniture assembly to see if it could be used to estimate materials needed in rough wood stock.  So -  longer thinner sheets vs a large piece of plywood.  Is there a reason some of the parts are limited in their rotation or is there an easier way to force all the components vertically along their longest edge? Though they would all fit in the sheet if vertical, it gives an error when I make the sheet smaller at a some point.

[javiar]

@fhirschOFP , 

Arrange tool is included with a paid subscription license of Fusion 360 (same for student and startup licenses) without requiring any additional Extension purchase.

Advanced Arrange is currently in preview. Once fully released, it is intended to become part of the Nesting & Fabrication Extension.

Ravi J

[javiar]

@Anonymous ,

Currently, there is a way to manually set the component orientation. Please see the overview video by Justin Brouillette from Portland CNC. At 5:40, he shows how to do this.

Orientation value applies a counterclockwise rotation to the initial 0 degree position of the component. And the checkboxes specify allowed rotations to this initial position. For example, in the image below, Orientation = 10, and allowed rotations are all disabled. As a result, the part is arranged at 10 degrees counterclockwise from it's 0 degree position. To make this work for your example, you'll need to try a few orientation options for each of the components and see how the results pan out.

As a future enhancement, we have been considering implementing a way to set orientation by selecting a component edge. This method would eliminate the guess work and make it much more intuitive. While this is already on our backlog, at this time I can not comment on when this will be implemented.

Ravi J

[jean-michel_legoff]

Hi, 

I have a question about Arrange/nest feature.

How do you select the longitudinal plane of a cylinder for aranging/nesting feature...

Imagine this case:

how can you lay down the "cylinder"?

many thank

@

[javiar]

@jean-michel_legoff ,

You can project the cylinder profile onto a tangent plane and create a patch surface for this projected sketch within the same component (the cylinder). Then use this patch as your object selection for the arrange feature. This will give you the desired result. See image below.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Ravi J

[jean-michel_legoff]

Hi,

In a context of woodworking, I was wondering if it could be possible to define the "vein direction" of wood in Nesting and connect it to the appearance orientation of the wood texture (and vice -versa)
it could be user friendly to apply the wood texture to a panel, and use this "orientation" in "nesting".

Many thanks

[Dan.Wellnitz]

Advanced arrange or basic nesting was a feature I looked forward to for many years and found it to work very well in its latest version. I was super disappointed to lose access to it on the core F 360 commercial license. I make furniture out of plywood on a CNC and grain direction is critical in a sheet layout. Now I can't even edit all the designs I had used that feature on. I think Fusion 360 would really increase in fan loyalty and therefore the number of happy paying customers if improvements and important features like advanced arrange weren't pulled out of reach behind an expensive paywall when the preview period is closed.

[Dan.Wellnitz]

Is there any chance of advanced arrange ever being included in the core feature set? It made Fusion 360 a viable and great alternative to other cabinet and wood furniture design software options, many of which include nesting. The extension is just so expensive for that one feature.   

[eruizhDWSUK]

Hi, since the topic I wanted to comment on is closed, this is my last option. It's reagarding the nest option (not arrange). When exporting a nest to DXF and I try to open it in Adobe Illustrator, the scale is wrong. I also had issues Adobe Illustrator not opening the DXF directly. I had to convert it to EPS.

Hope this feedback helps

Best

[jean-michel_legoff]

Hello,

is the Arrange feature be able to arrange unfolded sheetmetal components from an assembly?

or is it only possible via using Nesting Extension?

Many Thanks