Adobe Illustrator Question: Populating a Sheet with an Object

[Scott Memmer]

Hello.

I use a material that comes in sheet stock and is both very expensive and hard to come by. Because of this, I want to maximize my yield during laser cutting by populating by Illustrator doc with the tiniest tolerances between hundreds of identical shapes. Does someone know how to do this, and could you perhaps share a link or two with instructions?

I know most people use Corel Draw, but Illustrator is fast, easy and works perfectly for my needs. I run a tight ship, from profits derived by sweat equity, so I feel no need to buy the Corel program.

Thanks,
Scott

[Mike Null]

CorelDraw is not your answer. What you need is a nesting program often found in vinyl cutting software such as Signlab. There are others but I'm not aware of any freebies.

Sure enough, I did a search and there are several free nesting programs.

[Scott Memmer]

Mike, thanks. So, to clarify, the feature I'm seeking is "NESTING," correct?

sm

[Kev Williams]

I've found that my own nesting saves more material than the nesting programs I've tried.
If the pieces are identical, just takes a bit of patience to get a couple of starter rows going--
I just went into Corel and drew a random jagged shape, and then tried to make a decent nested batch. I made a copy, then rotated the pieces until I had a good tight fit that I could copy vertically. Once I got a vertical row done, then I took 2 more pieces, rotated them 180, then messed with them until I got a good side fit, then copied them along side-
After that, each pair of row fit nicely the previous pair. It took about 15 minutes to get the first 2 rows done. A nesting program would be faster, but would it be more efficient at saving material? ;)

Here's a pic of the results, below is a zipped Corel9 file of the job-
438629

438630

(note that not one piece is touching another piece)
If someone wants to take that shape and run it thru a nesting program to fit a 24x24" shape like mine, I'd love to see if it could best me :)
-- because if it can, I'll probably buy it! :D

[Scott Memmer]

Kev, cool stuff, thanks for sharing. Yeah, I don't mind doing the nesting manually vs paying for some software. The sheet I'm cutting is only about 12" x 12", so after I do a couple rows I can just copy and paste.

Thanks Again,
Scott

[Ian Stewart-Koster]

There are free nesting programs for SVG etc.
I use E-cut's plug-in for Corel and like it. There are times you can do a better job manually, but I find when you learn to drive & tweak the nesting program, it gets useful. E-cut has other useful features worth paying for.
Enroute also nests, but it's pricey.
I think E-cut might have an Illy plug-in.