I’m trying OpenNest to fit steps for a staircase onto sheets of offcut material on a project I’m working on.
I’ve got the script working, but it’s not giving me the most optimal solution:
I have 16 steps to make in total, and OpenNest is giving me a solution where 8 steps fit onto one sheet but the remaining 8 are spread across two separate sheets, using 3 sheets of material instead of 2. The sheets are the same size and you’d think the solution where 8 fits onto one sheet could just be duplicated for the most optimal result.
I realise I can just bake the second sheet for my drawings, and I will, but I was wondering if there’s a way to make OpenNest optimize its solution better?
Just one question though – shouldnt less iterations = less variety in the solution? Ex. 1 iteration = the same pattern repeated for all sheets, 2 iterations = 2 different patterns repeated for all sheets etc.? Or is my logic way off?
as far as I understood, each iteration is a further loop of the optimization algorithm, so the more iterations means the more optimized… up to a certain point where you have obtained the best solution and the result won’t change anymore even if more iterations are triggered
if the best that you can get with a given seed is at 50 iterations, running 200 more iterations won’t change the final output… but if you are unsure whether you got the best possible solution for a given seed or not, then running more iterations won’t hurt (worst case scenario: you wait a few more seconds and get the very same output)
