I was testing out the new nesting and couldn’t find any way to prioritize what was nested. Is this feature not available or am I missing something? it seemed to pick from the list randomly and Id like it to try to fit certain parts first in the required quantities and then fill the rest of the spaces with the other parts. I also typical cut 4 yard stake signs on a 48 x 48 sheet and manually arrange them. The nesting could never create a nest that placed all 4 signs on the same sheet. I was hoping for time saving i could load 50 signs and have it arrange them on 48” sheets but there is only one arrangement that will fit the irregular shapes and it could never create a nest that included more than three. Hopefully I’m missing some setting.
I’m not aware of a method to prioritize the nested parts. I don’t believe you are missing anything.
I’ve spent some time testing v8’s new features. As for autonesting feature, I compare results with another nesting program I use from time to time, deepnest.io. You should try that one and draw your own conclusions.
deepnest.io does have the function to nest into a boundary that already has fixed nested parts, from a previous nesting result for instance. So in that way, indirectly, you can prioritize/order the nested shapes. deepnest has it’s quirks also, but once you understand them through practice, it will handle the use case that you describe.
One deepnest quirk is that the nesting solution (dxf) is drawn in layer “0”, including the original dxf parts in their original layers but arranged to overlap the nested layer “0”. This creates duplicate lines, to which sheetcam will complain. Although sheetcam can handle duplicate lines, its best not to force it. So don’t draw your parts to be nested in layer “0”, that allows you to edit the resulting deepnest dxf nested solution to eliminate the duplicate drawings in layer “0”, and thus you preserve the original layers of your drawing, but with parts nested as you desired.