Learn/Laser/Import & sheet layout
Auto nesting
At a glance
- Nest cuttable parts with configurable padding; engrave-only parts stay out of the nest solver
- Quick / Medium / Max effort presets—background solving keeps the UI responsive
- Turn a file, Drafting, or Design part into custom stock with real holes, concavities, and islands
The Auto-Nest button sits next to the import buttons in the Parts section; its dropdown picks the effort level and opens the nesting settings. The solver runs in a background worker, so the UI stays responsive and parts animate onto the sheet as they're placed. You can cancel a long nest mid-run.
Custom plate shapes
Import the plate or remnant as a normal part from a file, Drafting, or Design. Right-click it on the canvas or in the Parts browser and choose Set Plate Shape. Closed outside contours become material; holes become unavailable voids; disconnected outside contours stay as separate material islands. Arcs and concave edges keep their shape. A mesh marks the missing material inside the sheet's display area.
The sheet row shows a Custom Plate badge plus the source, actual dimensions, and retained rectangular dimensions. Width and Height stay read-only while custom stock is active. Release Plate Shape restores that rectangle and returns the source as a loose part. Right-clicking another eligible part offers Replace Plate Shape and restores the previous source during the swap.
Nesting, Fill Sheet, manual placement, generated cuts and leads all use the same real material boundary. A part through-hole may surround a stock void when there is enough material around it. Automatic overflow tries other existing sheets before creating rectangles from the retained Width, Height, and laser settings. Add Sheet creates a rectangle; Duplicate Sheet deliberately copies the custom plate.
Effort levels
Quick uses skyline packing and finishes in about a second — great for rectangular-ish parts. Medium switches to NFP-style edge-walk placement with four rotations (0/90/180/270 degrees) and takes a few seconds. Max sweeps twelve orientations per part for the best material utilization and can run thirty seconds or more on a busy sheet. You can also define custom efforts with their own name, algorithm tuning, and padding. The algorithms are shared with Plasma — see Skyline packing and NFP nesting for how they work.
Padding, not kerf multiples
Where Plasma spaces parts as a multiple of the cut-chart kerf, Laser uses an explicit padding distance — built-in efforts use 0.010 in, and custom efforts store their own value editable in your preferred units. The same padding sets both the gap between parts and the inset from the sheet edge. Spacing offsets are built straight from contour geometry, so you don't need to generate toolpaths before nesting.
What gets nested
Eligibility is cut-only: a part needs at least one enabled cut contour to enter the solver. Engrave-only parts stay where they are, while cut parts that carry engrave internals nest normally. Locked parts are respected as fixed obstacles. If valid offsets can't be built for the remaining parts, the nester reports them once and stops rather than spinning up sheet after sheet.