I apologize if this has been discussed elsewhere, but I couldn’t find anything. Basically, I work with “jigs” or plywood gridwork parts that are assembled for temporary purposes. (They are typical “dog boned” together but joinery is not important to this discussion. ) I would like to write a grasshopper definition that takes parts (some which are larger than able to fit on one sheet of plywood) and chops them into smaller parts and nests them, then intelligently moves the chopping lines to minimize the amount of nested material. Do you guys think this can be done? Or does this start to approach on AI as the definiation will have to “learn” with each nesting cycle?
The thing with nesting is the smaller parts you have the easier to nest.
When you have only 2-5 parts that could be fit to a sheet of plywood, I would suggest to do it manually or do rectangular nesting, which is usually not the case for diagonal elements.
What kind of elements or shapes do you have?
Shapes vary a lot. Some are close to rectangles, lots L shaped, but really every shape. I do it by hand now, but its 30-35 sheets on a usual job(150-250 parts), so I’m looking for another option.
How about a marketplace for grasshopper work? I feel like a lot more people would be chiming in if there was an opportunity to make some money.
Hi - you could try posting in the Jobs category:
https://discourse.mcneel.com/c/jobs-portfolios
-wim
I posted to the jobs category. I was just thinking if that is not successful, maybe someone can suggest any literature I can read on how I can intelligently pick the joint lines to maximize nesting yield.
Not a nesting expert but i think you can try RhinoNest ( https://mecsoft.com/rhinocam-nest/ ) or https://deepnest.io/ ?
RhinoNest is great for nesting parts smaller than a sheet. It has no tools to divide large parts to smaller-than-sheet-sized parts.
Hello,
your need seems quite complicated, to my point of view, it seems best that you make a definition to handle this problem. The most efficient should be you create some custom C# (or whatever oriented objets) classes with sort of Agents. Agents will have rules, cut not to near from a hole, from the frontier, minimal/maximal lengths of pieces …
For my needs I will have to make also some tools that splits parts and I will use what I explained above.
I would prefer grasshopper, because I am more familiar, but if you write something I would appreciate it if you would send it over to me.
As Laurent (aka the Good Samaritan) rightly pointed out a custom class is the way to go. Rather impossible to do that (general case) with components.
Well this requires me hiring someone, because I am not well versed in C+