MecSoft Corporation

I am having trouble using the nest module, I am nesting about 150 parts with features such as engraved labels and rabbeted joinery. the features get interpreted as separate parts, even when the part is grouped together. If the features and labels are lost, the nest is useless!

I worked with your file for a bit and I got it to nest correctly according to your description, but I had to do a little bit of tweaking. Some of this you no doubt know but regardless, here is what I did.

None of the interior geometry can be outside the perimeter geometry. Not even a little bit. Some of your interior rabbets were slightly outside the perimeter and once I moved them back most of them worked. I couldn't see anything wrong with the couple of rabbets that didn't work but it might be a tolerance issue. I moved the offending rabbets inside by .001" and then they worked.
I didn't have any issues with the text labels.

On a side note, I really think there should be an option to group a set of curves and then those curves would get nested as a locked position group regardless of how they were located in relation to each other. Maybe there is a good reason that it wouldn't work, in which case I would be interested in knowing the reason.

Something else that I just noticed is that you can work with your parts in "real-time". Once you have the parts selected to nest you can continue to modify the parts and the nesting manager keeps track of the parts. For instance, if you move a piece of geometry inside another piece the parts in the nest tree update automatically to make that part an interior feature.

Also curves within a curve within a curve, like the center of the "e" will get dropped out as a separate part. I can't find a way around this. I guess it's something to do with the part within a part logic.

I have noticed over the years that this forum is a bit slow on response and I'd love to bring a little more life to the discussions. Here's my contribution and maybe we can get some words of wisdom from the developers

Thank you for your response!
Those are good points that I will look into. Of course my initial thought is that tweaking individual parts in a nesting environment defeats the entire purpose of nesting - which is to save time!

Recently I have been able to nest parts and features successfully. Pockets and grooves and holes are staying with the part, selectable for CAM, etc. It seems all is well ATM.

My work around for instance when I have a rebate that goes outside the external cut line is to create a nesting layer that goes outside everything, I colour this layer bright green so it stands out, then I turn it off once nested as I say its my work around when the nesting gives me issues.

This is a good workaround; I hadn't thought of this. I'll give it a try the next time I run into this!