I tried out the nesting tool yesterday. I have a 400x415mm Falcon 10W Laser.
The material I bought and currently use, is 400x300mm. I made a template which I use when cutting files and fit them into this template.
I thought I’ll try out the nesting tool. To my surprise nothing happened. I had the expectation that the Nesting tool will arrange the chosen project more efficient than what I can, but it did absolutely nothing. My goal was to have a little as possible wastage.
I tried a couple of times more and nothing. I then moved a couple outside my template size and only then did the nesting happen.
Am I right in saying that the nesting tool will only “nest” pieces that are outside the frame?
The documentation says “Exports selected objects to a file, copies that file path, and opens SVGnest.com so you can upload the file and nest your objects.”
I tried it and it’s a bit unintuitive - its not clear whether it requires you to upload an svg file or whether it can handle a lightburn file. When I clicked OK in the dialog it took me to my downloads folder where there was a lightburn nest file, but it hadn’t nested anything, just turned all the objects upside down.
Hi Deon,
I haven’t had much luck with nesting tools either, especially on wood. I am pretty pedantic about lining up wood grain so I find I get better results just doing it manually. I have become less concerned about trying to get everything cut as compact as possible and spend more effort on keeping the waste sized and shaped to be reusable for other work. that has slowed down my trash bin filling up significantly.
cheers,
Rob
I haven’t found SVG Nest to be at all useful. I once let it run for 4 hours and it failed to orient and space as efficiently as I could do manually in under an hour. This was a file with nearly 150 objects (mostly plain discs plus a few complex organic shapes) that only required approx 60% of the available space. When I cancelled the nest, it still had overlapping objects and the “waste” areas were less useable for potential small-job follow-up use. Prior to the 4 hour run, I had already done several 30 min trials tweaking settings using the same project.
There may be a happy medium project type where it works wonderfully, but I have yet to find it.