Help nesting with attributes

[Luca_Ferrarese]

Hi everyone,
I hope I’m not repeating questions that have already been answered. I’ve seen other open threads on the topic, but I haven’t been able to solve the problem. I’m still new to Grasshopper, so I apologize for any inaccuracies or ignorance.

I need to nest nearly 500 CNC-cut objects with their respective engravings. I’ve managed to nest just the cutting contours, to first see how much material I’ll need. My problem is nesting the complete objects: cutting and engraving curves together.

I found a way, using one of Open Nest’s test files, to include the cutting curves with their respective engravings in the nesting, but it requires selecting piece by piece and attribute group by attribute group.

I’m sure there’s a way to create a program to automate everything, but I just can’t seem to figure it out.

I’d be grateful for any advice you can give me, or even better, if you could help me create the code in Grasshopper.

Thanks in advance.

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This is a test file I created with random shapes for this post.

nesting_with_attributes.3dm (371.0 KB)

nesting_with_attributes.gh (24.3 KB)

[laurent_delrieu]

Hello
the main problem you have here is make an association between the shapes, all curves could be on a Branch of a DataTree, or the best thing is to have object attribute for example Name, Type …
In Name you will have Shape1, Shape2 … in Type Cut, Engraving 1, Engraving 2 …
So with recents tools in Rhino 8 or with tools Like Elefront you can sort, filter, objects by type, name.
I used the Attribute/Elefront way for one of my project

Low Table PatDef

Here some pictures of my last project. [IMG_6302_min] [IMG_6296_min] [IMG_6312_min] There will be 9 suction cups to maintian the 800 mm glass [render] The table is done with 235 (62 + 65 + 4*2) laser cutted 1 mm thick aluminium pieces. 65 pieces where painted in black. Non painted piece were engraved. The were cutted by “Le metalist” https://www.lemetalist.fr. Junction pieces were doubled to augment the rigidity. All pieces are hold together by 1981 (1945 + 36) 3.2 mm aluminium alumini…

You will see that from a mess of curves tools can sort each one in a different dxf (I was not nesting myself so the company needed a file per shape (with cutting and engraving))

So one question : How did you generate the curves ? If Grasshopper there is surely a good way to order things better from the beginning
If not a tools has to be done to associate the data.

So here I awful way to associate the messy data, without 100 % chance of success.
It implied there is just one curve for each piece (not good)
Also for some reason there are invalid curves in the rhino document. I quite don’t understand why.

Extract the curves from Layers
Filter the mess (invalid curves)
Make a middle point on engraving
Make a mesh from CUT curves
Make an integer for each CUT curve (0 to 18)
Search the closest mesh for each point, sort the result and sort also the indexes
Then place data in 2 Datatree, I use a component form NAutilus plugin because I never remember how to do that with Grasshopper components (it is there)

Creating a data tree from a list of indices

hello good people, I am trying to find a good way to create a data tree, from a set of geometries I have, sorted according to a list of indices or indexes I have, giving that I have duplicate numbers in the index list I expect to have branches with multiple values, but I can’t find a way to that . thanks in advance [image]

One with just the curves
One with everything
nesting_with_attributes.gh (28.9 KB)