Does anyone know if the Glowforge software will be able to pack different shapes into the outline shape of our cutting surface? It would be amazing if the camera could define the shape of the thing being cut, and you could insert a number of objects you would like to print. The software would translate and rotate the objects to fill the void, and tell you the maximum number of objects based on the size you wanted. It would be nice to be able to tell it to not rotate items, if you need them to all face a certain direction, if you needed that. This would help from wasting material. Something like this: http://longnguyenhuu.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Packing-app-Result-Shirts-e1466006198982.png
or http://www.eddaardvark.co.uk/images/shape_icon.png
or even artistic like this:
I don’t know if it will do it nativly (I actually doubt it) but this may help! http://hackaday.com/2016/01/22/pack-your-plywood-cuts-with-genetic-algortihms/
This has been “in the hopper” since Oct 2015 — not likely at release, but could be added later on.
Oh, that is sick! bookmarked, thanks!
That’s sweet! Thanks for the link!
Very kewl - I wonder if the program would solve some of those packing puzzles. (Fitting the shapes into the frame so they all fit)
I’ve been playing around with svgnest, as @JeremyNielsen suggests . It’s pretty cool. It does not work with an SVG that has shapes inside other shapes (e.g. a square with a circle cut out of it), but for all other SVGs it worked great for me.
So with already-nested shapes, you might want to create a top-level SVG for the nesting and then try to duplicate that manually? Or would that not really work.
I usually make 2 svgs, one with nesting and one with just the outer shapes (I delete all the “holes” from the shapes.
I use SVGnest to figure out the nesting and then I copy and paste the shapes with “holes” into the one SVGnest created.
It’s not pretty, but it works.