Auto nesting
At a glance
- Tool-aware Auto padding — largest contour tool diameter plus stock to leave plus margin, per part
- Multiple effort presets with background solving so the UI stays responsive
- Use an imported, Drafting, or Design part as custom sheet stock, including holes and separate islands
The Auto-Nest split button in the Parts browser runs the nester and controls nest-on-import: with the dot green, freshly imported parts nest immediately using your default effort; red means they stage loose until you nest by hand. The dropdown lists the built-in efforts — Quick, Medium, and Max — plus any custom efforts; the radio picks the import default and clicking a name nests right now. Solving runs in a background worker, placements stream onto the sheet live, and the button becomes Cancel while a nest is in flight.
Custom plate shapes and remnants
Import the plate or remnant as an ordinary part from a file, Drafting, or Design. Right-click it on the canvas or in the Parts browser and choose Set Plate Shape. The part's closed outside contours become material, its closed holes become unavailable voids, and disconnected outside contours remain separate material islands. Concave edges and arcs keep their actual shape. The canvas fills usable material and meshes missing areas.
The sheet row shows Custom Plate, its source, actual dimensions, and the saved rectangular Width and Height. Those dimensions stay read-only until Release Plate Shape restores the rectangle and returns the source as a loose part. Replace Plate Shape swaps in another eligible part while restoring the previous source. Duplicate Sheet copies the custom plate; Add Sheet makes a rectangle.
Auto-Nest and Fill Sheet respect the custom boundary, voids, already placed parts, and each part's operation-specific required material. A Pocket floor still requires stock, so it cannot be parked over a missing area. Manual drag and typed placement use the same rule. Sheet Facing follows all custom material islands and voids. If the custom plate fills up, JetCad3 tries other existing sheets and then creates rectangular overflow sheets from the retained Width, Height, material, thickness, and Router operations.
Padding sized to your tooling
Router spacing is an explicit clearance distance, not a kerf multiple. Built-in efforts use Auto padding: the gap is sized to the largest tool diameter among the Contour operations that cut each part's outside profile (plus stock to leave), with an additional 1/16" safety margin on top — enough that two neighboring parts can both be profiled without the cutter breaking into the next part. If no qualifying contour operation exists yet, padding falls back to 0.010". One clearance value covers both part-to-part spacing and the sheet-edge inset.
Efforts and custom efforts
Quick uses fast skyline packing with a coarse rotation step; Medium and Max walk part and sheet edges for candidate positions, trying more rotations per part (Max sweeps every 30°) for tighter nests at the cost of solve time. Settings… in the dropdown opens the effort editor, where a custom effort sets its algorithm, rotation granularity, manual padding or Auto padding with its own safety margin, a Concavity threshold (keep concave outlines for tight packing, or collapse complex parts to a convex hull for speed), a time limit, and a start corner.
Obstacles, overflow, and starting over
Locked parts stay put and are packed around, so you can pin a part on a remnant and nest the rest. Nesting fills the active sheet first — including loose parts — then overflows to other sheets in order, and creates a new sheet if parts still remain. Rip Up Nest clears every unlocked part back to staging without re-nesting, so you can rearrange before the next run.