Nesting

Nesting for the BeeGraphy Editor. Place flat parts onto sheets or containers efficiently, cut down on wasted material, and prepare layouts for CNC routing, laser cutting, or similar fabrication. The plugin provides two approaches: fast, predictable rectangular nesting when your parts fit bounding boxes, and true-shape nesting when you need parts packed by their real outlines—including curves and holes.

Node Groups

Rectangular Nesting

Use these nodes when every part can be represented by its rectangular bounding box. They are simpler, faster, and easier to reason about than true-shape methods.

• Nesting Guillotine Best Fit Naive – greedy guillotine placement with a best-fit rule. Good for straightforward sheet layouts that can be cut with straight, full-width cuts.
• Genetic Nesting Guillotine Best Fit Naive – the same guillotine logic driven by a genetic algorithm. Use it when you can afford longer computation for materially denser layouts.
• Nesting Row Naive – fills horizontal rows left to right, then starts a new row. Great for simple, strip-like layouts where visual order matters.
• Nesting MaxRects Best Fit – tracks the largest remaining free rectangles and places each part where it leaves the least wasted space. A strong default for general rectangular packing.
• Nesting BLF Naive – bottom-left-fill: each part goes to the lowest, then leftmost free spot. Predictable and fast; useful for stable, repeatable results.
• Nesting CBLF Naive – corner-bottom-left variant that favors available corners. Similar to Nesting BLF Naive with slightly different packing behavior.
• Nesting Guillotine 3-Stage – optimized for format-cutting machines: the sheet is divided into horizontal strips, strips into vertical stacks, and stacks into parts. Choose this when your cutting workflow follows a 3-stage guillotine process.

True Shape Nesting

Use these when parts are non-rectangular, curved, concave, or contain holes—cases where bounding boxes waste significant material.

• Nesting Polygon Genetic – true-shape polygon nesting with a genetic algorithm and bitmap collision detection. Supports hole filling and multi-angle rotation.
• Nesting Bitmap Polygon – true-shape nesting via bitmap pixel-mask collision. Handles curved, concave, and holed shapes natively, with BLF (fast) and GA (dense) packing, per-part rotation, kerf-aware spacing, a hex pre-pass for circular inputs, and QLM post-pass compaction.

Overlay

• Overlay Nested Geometry – takes nested layouts and places them back onto a target geometry. It applies translation, rotation about the base geometry’s bounding-box center, and an optional rotated offset. Wire arrays into the ports and control pairing with the node’s List Matching options: Shortest List, Longest List, or Cross Reference.

Examples

Fast rectangular sheet layout
Feed your part bounding boxes into Nesting MaxRects Best Fit together with a sheet size. The node returns non-overlapping, space-efficient positions. If your shop uses a guillotine cutter, swap in Nesting Guillotine 3-Stage to respect a strip–stack–part cutting strategy.

Dense true-shape cutting layout
For irregular acrylic or plywood parts, route them into Nesting Bitmap Polygon. Rotations can be enabled per part, and kerf-aware spacing accounts for the cutting tool’s width. Start with the BLF mode for quick previews; switch to GA mode when material efficiency is critical.

Placing nested parts back into a drawing
Use Nesting Polygon Genetic to produce placement transforms for complex shapes, then connect an Overlay Nested Geometry node. Choose Longest List or Cross Reference on the overlay node to control how each part transforms onto its target geometry, and feed arrays of translations and rotations to batch-place an entire layout at once.