Let me explain the key points of the sheet-metal blanking nesting logic in SWTDO:Blanking nesting is called “Nesting” in English.There are several key points to consider in nesting:1, How large a raw sheet to useLaser cutting machines have their own maximum length and width, so when doing sheet-metal nesting you must first specify the limit size of the machine’s raw material. (Counter-example: you cannot load a 5-meter raw sheet into a cutting machine that only accepts 3 meters.) So does that mean that if you specify 3 meters, the nesting result will necessarily be 3 meters? Of course not. If all the sheets you need to cut add up to only 2 meters, then that extra 1 meter would be wasted material. So this sheet setting only gives the maximum limit for the nested size — it is not “set X and output X”; you have to combine it with the final output result.2. Mixed nesting vs. single-set nesting:Purely from the standpoint of saving raw material, mixed nesting is always the most economical. Suppose a sheet-metal electrical control cabinet has 20 sheet-metal parts to cut. If you need 100 sets, the calculation basis for mixed nesting is 2,000 sheets rather than 20 — it is definitely more material-efficient than 20 sheets, because there are more matching possibilities. However, from the standpoint of production process and market demand, mixed nesting has major limitations:

1. Limitation 1: you must wait until all 2,000 sheets are fully cut before you can sort and assemble, rather than being able to assemble immediately each time one set (20 sheets) is cut.
2. Limitation 2: if one sheet-metal part is cut badly, then once a defect occurs, the same sheet-metal part across all 100 sets will all be defective
3. Limitation 3: if the order changes — adding a set, reducing a set, etc. — it will cause chaos in cutting.
4. Limitation 4: it greatly increases the difficulty of sorting. Can the cost of assigning more sorting staff offset the material cost you save?

Summary: only mature processes with very large batch sizes suit mixed nesting; in most cases, single-set nesting is more reasonable.3. Nesting naturally requires uniform thickness.Sheet-metal parts of different thicknesses cannot be nested together4. What if the sheet-metal raw material is brushed on one side, or has film on one side? That is, the sheet metal can be nested rotated, but flipping is not allowed.What makes SWTDO’s rectangular nesting and blanking layout different from other nesting tools:

• Other software: bend-formed product → make an unfolded flat drawing → nest
• Rectangular nesting: bend-formed product → nest

We have no intermediate step and go straight to the nesting result. We do not support flipping.

1. Reason 1: we have another auxiliary tool, Batch Fixed-Face Specification. This tool can predefine the front/back faces you want to control. (Note: this tool supports batch processing all sheet metal, and is one of the few multi-selection batch tools in SWTDO that supports “faces”.)
2. Reason 2: we can batch-control sheet-metal thickness, bend factor, and bend radius, because all three strongly affect the unfolded drawing dimensions.

5. Also, precisely because we go straight from the original sheet-metal features to Nesting, in this video, for mirrored parts, at the time we produced the video we could not directly perform sheet-metal nesting.But now SWTDO has been upgraded to 26.2.16, and we have added a major tool: N-Import. Using its batch modification recognition and batch sheet-metal recognition, we can process in one go all sheet-metal parts that have no original sheet-metal features, and then combine rectangular nesting to close the loop on the whole one-click sheet-metal flattening and nesting workflow.

Overseas, a nesting tool costs about several thousand euros, and in China it costs several thousand RMB. In SWTDO, it is just a small tool among our batch-processing tools, giving designers a quick, rough idea of their product’s cost.Finally, use SWTDO’s CNV format to name the nesting drawing, realizing our dual master-data index; it can be stored in SWTDO’s personal database, enabling fast export of production files.