Nesting Requests/Suggestions

[TylerJ804]

Hey guys,

I've been using Fusion since 2020 in order to run my 5x10 Felder H08 CNC router for cabinet making. Fusion has been awesome, and I've compiled a list of changes that would really benefit the wood working industry and add functionality to the software. I'm hoping that the development team will consider them! 

Stay down 2d contour -
When cutting out full sheets of material(4x8, 5x8 etc) of plywood, mdf etc, there exists a tool path in other programs called stay down contours; and basically it just ramps in once, and then proceeds to outline all of the parts in one go - rather than ramping in and ramping out and rapiding over to the next part(especially for parts right next to each other on the same cut line).

Automatic onion skinning -
With a 2d contour, it would be great if there was a function to automatically onion skin a part based on dimensions alone, I.E. if part is less than 5" in X or Y, it automatically does a two pass cut, leaving 1mm behind on the first pass and clearing it off on the second passs. I do this now manually by having an "onion skin" tool path and a "full depth pass", I manually select all of the parts that get onion skinned. I imagine this would work similar to the automatic pocket detection.

Offset Ramping -
When I cut prefinished materials, I use a compression mill which has an up cut on the bottom and a down cut on top, when I ramp into the material the up cut portion will chip out at the start of the cut up until it clears the down cut portion. The solution to this, is to have the tool ramp in at a slight angle, and then turn into the final dimension after the ramp is complete. I experiment with lead in and lead outs for this, but I haven't been successful as fusion often
gives me an error and it ends up dropping the tool path in question. Using lead in/lead out also randomly cuts into neighboring parts. 

Small Parts Nesting -
For whatever reason, Fusion almost always puts very small parts on the outer most portion of the nest, and with any vacuum table you have the least amount of hold down on the outside, which has a tendency to send parts flying or cause collisions. It would be great if the system could place them in the middle of the sheet, which I often end up doing manually.

Drill Block Optimization support -
I think this might be a little more complicated to implement, but it would be a great feature. As it stands my cabinet parts use a variety of holes, I often drill 4mm, 5mm, 7.5mm, 8mm and 15mm holes all on the same sheet. These holes are spread throughout the different parts. Currently I have individual tool paths to drill each sized hole, which my machine will automatically use it's drill block to accomplish in the order of the setup sheet.  Other nesting programs will optimize the order of drilling, so that it will drill all of the different sized holes on whatever axis, as it's in the position. So the machine will constantly swap drills on the block as it's moving along X and Y, drilling all of the holes along it's path.

Automatic milling style selection -
I'm not sure what the criteria is, but often when I create set ups from a nest, the set ups will generate as "cutting" instead of milling, even though the last nest I created was automatically set to milling. This isn't a huge deal, but it's just a small inefficiency when I'm nesting 50+ sheets.

Sources screen -
1) Add option to ignore parts from the sources screen rather than just the design workspace. Selecting 0 is a work around, but it still gets listed in material sources and induces clutter.

2) Single checkbox to disable all rotations of a part, instead of having to make 5 clicks.

3) Add material appearances to all views of parts to help with grain orientation; you have color in the perspective view but not the orientation views which makes it difficult to orient square parts that have grain.

Labels -
Instead of the part number being on the corner of a part, it would be very helpful if it were
in the center and maybe the font could be bigger. Sometimes it's really hard to tell what's
what. It would be even better if the part name could just be located on the part itself in the
diagram, rather than having to search for the name of the number you're looking for, but I know this

wouldn't work for small parts. 

Thank you!