Nesting Utility Improvements for Millwork

[bmaryou]

I'd Like to see Nesting Utility have improvements for the Wood and Mill working Industries. We have a lot of simple parts, mostly square and rectangular geometry.  I do not see how we have to sketch / project geometry on every single part and declare the thickness off all the parts in order for the nest to identify the parts geometry to use in a nest. When you have over 300 to 1000 parts to nest, this process gets rather tedious just to figure out how many sheets of material to purchase. 

Other than that, there is no indication of part orientation. There are alot of parts that contain grain direction. You have an option to rotate parts but how can you tell which direction the grain is or which edge is the front edge of a cabinet? All you see is colored shapes. 

It would also be helpful to 3d export the nest  for CNC programming using the original parts instead of duplicating the parts or creating a whole new solid body part file. What happens if the source model or parts have changes? The new file doesn't update so you have to redo the nest and re 3d export. 

I think Nesting Utility has potential and works great if you can get it to work Every time. If this could be developed a little bit more, Nesting Utility would be a huge benefit to Autodesk customers in the wood industries. 

[javiar]

Hi @bmaryou ,

You need not create sketches/project geometry for each object. It will automatically detect the nestable profiles and thickness based on the solids and also automatically nest them onto appropriate materials + thicknesses. Can you elaborate why you need to create sketches and assign thickness manually? Perhaps I'm missing something here.

While we continue to maintain Inventor Nesting and address critical bugs, all new feature development for nesting is happening on Fusion 360. Given the increased development focus on enhancing Fusion 360 as the manufacturing tool, we have made some big enhancements to the nesting functionality in Fusion 360 - and Part + Material grain direction control is a major addition. I'd recommend trying the Fusion 360 Nesting and Fabrication Extension 7-day trial. See the links below for documentation on grain control:

• https://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=NST-PREP-ITEMS
• https://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=NST-COMP-SOURCES

Regarding maintaining associativity between model, nests, and the resulting 3D layout - this is where Fusion 360 shines. It maintains a link to the nest result and unlike Inventor Nesting, a separate 3D export is not required.

Also check out the Advanced Arrange feature in Fusion 360 - https://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=NST-ARR-ADV

Regards,

Ravi J

[bmaryou]

@javiar 

I have only tried to define sketches or project geometry because of several tutorials and blogs that I have read about the subject. Nesting tends to not like parts that have embossments or dozens of hole patterns, rabbets or grooves. As far as the nesting thickness goes, I have noticed that unless the "nesting thickness" is declared, inventor nest will assign some random thickness. So for every part I have to manually select "use for nesting" or use the nesting authority in order for the nesting thickness parameter to be created. I don't see why it cant just look for the original Thickness parameter the part has?

When creating a nest from an assembly, I get a successful nest about 20% of the time. The other 80% of the time it either crashes, sources never load or the sources load but none of the parts show up. It also becomes difficult to rotate parts. All you can see is colored geometric shapes when sources files are loaded. This becomes problematic when you have a part that is close to being square but the grain direction is required to go a certain way. Trying to sort through 500 to 1000 parts and rotating them is rather time consuming and complicated. 

We have been a long time user of the manufacturing and product design collection and Inventor nesting comes with this package. We already pay for this software and It should be able to run smoothly and problem free for any industry. I don't see why we would have to buy another software package to utilize this nesting feature without issues when its already provided in our purchase. Inventor Nesting has huge potential and benefits to the wood industry and right now its a huge headache and work flow killer. 

Thank you for recommending the nesting in Fusion, which I will keep an open mind and check out. Any further development for the wood industries would be much appreciated. 

[Anonymous]

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-ideas/libreria-de-vigas-de-madera-para-insertar-estructuras-...