Automatic Nesting In AutoCAD - Is it possible?

[bailey_paulsen]

I was wondering if anyone knows of any good nesting plugins, applications, or lisps?

Maybe something that doesnt do 100% of the work for you, but will lighten the workload.

Just for clarification, the idea is to lay out multiple parts onto a flat sheet of plywood, acrylic, or sheet metal to be machined.

I did some research and found that there's some separate programs you can download, websites you can use, or services you can buy but they all seem overpriced or overcomplex. I don't need something to calculate the weight of the material and the weight and area of the wasted material. Just something simple to save me some time playing Tetris every day when laying out parts.

I thought it was best to come on here and see if anyone has any favorites before going and trying out all these other programs and methods 1 by 1. Thank you in advance!

[Kent1Cooper]

A Search for "nesting" in this Forum gives mostly results about nested Blocks and/or Xrefs, but maybe >this< will give you something useful, and you may find others.

[hosneyalaa]

maybe Support what you want With an example of a drawing complete

[bailey_paulsen]

Attached you'll find a dwg of some nesting I've done manually in the past. In the drawing you can see multiple copies of my cnc template that shows lines for a 4'x8' layout, 4'x10' layout, and 5'x12' layout. Typically we lay out parts on a 4'x8' layout unless there's oversized parts that require larger material. We also have to include 0.6" minimum distance between any parts so that a 0.5" router bit can cut between them. 

You can see i laid out the parts to the best of my ability but I'm sure there was a better way to lay them out that would've wasted less material. But this already took hours and I'm always rushing to get stuff done so i sent it out as is. Anything that can save even a bit of time would be helpful.

[john.uhden]

@bailey_paulsen ,

I'll take a look at your DWG tomorrow with my work machine.  I have only 2002 at home.

Anyway, I wrote a nesting program in AutoLisp for vinyl swimming pool liners.  It is meant for arranging panels from long rolls of 6' wide vinyl to an Eastman automatic cutting machine.  Maybe it can be altered to handle your rectangular material.  But it's not freeware.

[daniel_cadext]

I used to use CadCode, it’s a very complex problem, especially if you have grained material, trim cuts, accounting for the tool size

Your parts are solids, so lisp is not the best API here, I had written a routine with .ARX or .NET BRep to extract a cut-list from casework.

It’s somewhere at theswamp.org, my problem ended up being getting the grain direction correct.