Nesting algorithm

Hi

I currently have access to an industrial laser cutter and know that one of the very time consuming tasks is to optimise material usage and time. Is there any features planned for automatic placement of multiple items as to minimise material usage and time spent on cutting (overlapping paths)?

If not then I think it is something that would very interesting to have build-in down the line when all the basic features are working perfectly :smile:

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Into the feature hopper it goes! (Great idea, will consider)

Cool. My university did some research into this and have also made test setups where they project the shapes to be cut on the physical material on the bed. Anyways, nesting is a very computationally heavy task (NP-hard) and is therefor something where your cloud-based platform becomes really beneficial.

I agree, would be a great feature to have, and as mentioned works from the strength of a cloud-based system. Glad it’s in the hopper.

This is a big deal for anyone with production goals in mind and/or expensive materials. Lots of issues to raise such as shared cut lines and kerf size. It’s a fantastic computer question that touches at the most fundamental abilities of software: P/NP. Is there an algorithm that most efficiently does x? Quick search of Inkscape plugins has minimal results. Not sure about Illustrator extensions.
http://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2014/12/nesting-software-for-next-to-nothing.html

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It would be an interesting project to figure out what is state-of-the-art in research, implement it, and make it available as an illustrator/inkscape extension.