I’m a digital fabrication trainer from France (CNC and laser, a lot of it around wood). For the past months I’ve been building the nesting tool I always wanted inside Rhino — and it’s releasing in the coming days, so I wanted to show it here first.
What it does:
One command: select your 3D model (closed polysurfaces), and the parts lay themselves flat onto your sheets — with mirrored parts flagged, labels, and per-sheet fill rate.
Then the part I care most about: manual adjustment with guaranteed spacing. Every part drags with magnetic contact along its neighbors — it slides, hugs, and stops. Rotate with R, mirror, extract and re-drop. Spacing is enforced the whole time, nothing to double-check.
Output: cut list (HTML/CSV/Excel), fill rates, and layered DXF ready for toolpaths (through-pockets and blind pockets on separate layers).
Why “interactive” is the whole point: the nesting engine is deliberately not chasing “optimal”. Automation has two blind spots — the material flaw only you can see (a knot in the sheet, a scar on a leather hide — it’s not in the file), and the obvious layout the solver missed. So the engine is built to be fast, and the drag is built to let you take over without losing the spacing guarantee. Great tools already exist on the algorithmic side (OpenNest and others) — this one bets on the hand.
The honest fine print: it’s free. The UI is French at launch — English is on the roadmap. Rhino 8, Windows.
Releasing in the coming days. Happy to answer questions — feedback very welcome.
Since the post above, one thing got a serious upgrade: the spacing
guarantee is now exact, everywhere. Every placement — automatic or
dragged by hand — is validated against the true contour-to-contour
distance. Ask for 12 mm, measure 12.0. And the magnetic drag now
stops at the exact gap in real time: what you see on screen is what
the end mill will respect.
5-minute walkthrough (French audio, English subtitles + auto-dub):
Feedback from people who cut real sheets is exactly what I’m after —
what would you need it to do?
The “French at launch, English on the roadmap” fine print from the first post is now obsolete — v1.3.2 ships with a full English interface: commands, prompts, dialogs, reports.
If you skipped this thread back in July, the short version today:
Free, open source (GPLv3), Rhino 8 / Windows
Flatten 3D solids → auto-nest → magnetic drag with exact spacing guarantee → layered DXF ready for VCarve
Not planned at the moment, but it’s a fair question and it made me look at how the usual tools do it. Most of them are rectangle-only (L1/L2/W1/W2), which doesn’t fit Form2Nest’s free contours. If it ever comes, it would more likely be marking side faces in 3D with Rhino’s native per-face colours, carried through flattening, with banded segments on their own layer and a length total per band type — nothing more than that, and no promise on when or whether.
Out of curiosity: mostly rectangular or curved parts, and does your edgebander pre-mill? That’s what would decide if it’s worth building at all.
