Opennest: Nesting with Basepoint

[tobias.stoltmann]

Hi there,
@Petras_Vestartas, I have a kind of special situation when using opennest…

I have to process a lot of panels panels that have a certain pattern on them.
First the panels are determined with their “basepoint” in relation to the pattern and are organized properly in blocks.

Now when I wanna nest them I definitely have to respect this point.
In the settings in opennest I use 0 rotations to prevent roatations.
But is there a way to respect the location in relation to the “baseline/basepoint” as well?
I fear it is not possible right? If not, could you think of any workaround?

Thanks,
T.

[Petras_Vestartas]

Hi,

No, not really.

Maybe try box packing. But it will also first sort elements based on area.

You can also try to write a custom script:)

[tobias.stoltmann]

@Petras_Vestartas
The scripting part… You mean to access OpenNests code?

Or (more likely) to add enough tolerance/space to the nested parts, so that later, once the nesting is done I can align the blocks Y-coordinate back to a specfici raster…

[inno]

is your pattern repetition relevant in 1D (for instance along axis X) or 2D (like X and Y) ?

because this maybe can be thought more like sorting on a grid, where the grid cell-size is defined by the pattern-unit bounding rectangle

[tobias.stoltmann]

@inno
It is relevant in 1D (Y-axis to be more specific).

You mean it would be sensible to add a contour to the geometry that saves the space for the “offset”, so it’ll always be placed correctly on the grid, right?

[inno]

thinking of a method that “might” work with standard nesting, the only way that I can imagine is to extend the theoretical rectangular_outline of each shape -for instance- to the bottom, until each shape includes the length of a full extra pattern_phase

a sort of 1D Minkowsky that, wherever the nesting algorithm will place your “extended shape”, you will have enough play to re-orient the real outline inside of this rectangle in order to get pattern-phase-alignment

with pattern_phase I mean the length by which the pattern repeats itself again

for instance, something like this:

theres a minor drawback lol to this for each nested part you are going to throw away a portion of sheet that is as wide as the part itself, and as tall as the pattern_phase… so I would consider this fine if and only if the pattern_phase is very small compared to the size of the shapes to cut

[edit] in practice, something like this:

1. extend shapes vertically by pattern-phase-length
   

   

2. nest those extended outlines instead, together with their alignment points and original shapes as attributes:
   

   

3. pull each reference point to the closest pattern-phase-line, and move the original shapes by the same amount:
   

   

I didn’t think that it might be a shape gets pulled up, like in case of shape#0 which invades shape#5 that luckily was also pulled up… that’s something to take into account… anyways, just a dirty sketch (and a lot of waste…)

Nesting_with_1Dimensional_phase_dirty_sketch.gh (34.0 KB)