Multi-Sheet Nesting Grows Up: Two Layout Styles and an Instant Feasibility Check

Two changes just landed in NestorCut, and both come straight from what users hit in real workshops: jobs that cannot fit the declared sheets, and multi-sheet layouts that mixed two visual styles on the same job. Both are fixed — and both make you save time before you save material.

An impossible job is now refused in milliseconds — with the fix

Picture the scene: 900 small parts and 100 larger ones on a single 1000 × 2000 mm sheet, 4 mm part spacing. The raw areas say it fits. It doesn’t — at 4 mm of spacing, every part effectively occupies more room than its outline (the spacing inflates each part on all sides), and the real ratio is closer to 92 % of the usable sheet. No packer on earth reaches 92 %.

Until now, such a job burned minutes of compute and delivered a layout hanging off the sheet edge. Now, a geometry-aware pre-check runs before anything computes. It accounts for the spacing-inflated footprint of every part and compares it to the usable area of your declared stock. When the job cannot fit, you know in milliseconds, with three concrete levers instead of a dead end:

• how many sheets the job actually needs (here: about 2),
• the maximum number of parts that fit at your current spacing,
• the maximum spacing that fits your current parts.

One click applies any of them — add a sheet, reduce the spacing, or relaunch. A refused job never costs a nesting credit. And when the stock is only slightly too tight, you get the best partial layout possible, clearly marked with the unplaced count and the same three levers — never a silent failure.

Two layout styles, homogeneous across every sheet

Single-sheet jobs have long offered two philosophies: a canonical grid and the engine’s densest compaction. Multi-sheet jobs only had one — a hybrid, with a compact engine-style first sheet and a re-gridded last sheet that looked like it came from another tool. That inconsistency is gone. Every multi-sheet job now proposes, side by side:

• Grid — the canonical layout. Rectangular parts sit in a perfectly regular pitch on every sheet, small parts fill the cutouts and the residual bands, and the last sheet stacks clean columns from the edge. It is deterministic: the same job produces the same layout, every time, on any machine. If you re-run last month’s job, you get last month’s nest — exactly what repeatable production and quoting want.
• Compaction — the engine’s own answer, left as the engine built it. Hosts keep their solver-chosen poses, every pocket gets filled, and the layout squeezes the last millimetres out of each sheet. On tight jobs it often edges out the grid on the final sheet.

The selector shows the sheet count and the reusable offcut of every sheet for each style, so you compare on what actually matters: the material that goes back to stock.

One honest caveat, because we prefer it that way: the grid style is proposed when your geometry suits it — a dominant rectangular part class plus a small-part class, quarter-turn rotations. Free-form parts (the demo project’s marine shapes, for instance) have no canonical grid, and NestorCut won’t invent one for them; those jobs keep the compaction style.

Verified, not claimed

Both features went through our physical verification bench: zero overlaps, zero out-of-sheet parts, zero duplicates on every alternative and every sheet, with the measured minimum distance exactly equal to the declared part spacing. On our reference job (100 hosts + 800 small parts, two 1000 × 1000 mm sheets, 2 mm spacing), the grid places 573 parts on the first sheet and 327 on the second — bit-identical whether it runs on our servers or in your browser. The compaction style lands at 555/345 on the same job. Both are cut-ready; the choice is yours.

Try it on your own parts — the demo project is one click away, and 10 free nestings every month.