Hi Michael,

Today we can easily create boundingbox of object in MoI.
Can it be improve to get the minimum arrangement boundingbox of several objects so we can get minimum size ?
Image below maybe help you to understand what I want :

Usually in consumer product and furniture industry, we need to optimize arrangement of many parts so we can get MINIMUM SIZE. Then we can put all the parts in to a carton box.

Another scenario is we have lets say 50 parts, then what is the minimum size of carton box then we need to put all the parts ?

This will very helpful if you can improve current boundingbox.

Thanks !

Hi Anis, often times that problem is called "nesting".

Nesting is a complex kind of thing to calculate, it's not really very related only to bounding box calculation, it involves all kinds of analysis of how pieces fit together and how they should be rotated and moved so that they can fit together with the smallest overall size.

So that is not at all something that really comes along with the bounding box calculation automatically, which is what it sounds like you are thinking from your description?

I don't really expect to be able to calculate nesting directly inside of MoI, you will probably need to get some special software for that part. It's just too specialized and difficult of an area for me to have much of a chance at doing it directly myself.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

>So that is not at all something that really comes along with the bounding box calculation automatically,
>which is what it sounds like you are thinking from your description?

I am aware that boundingbox cant calculate nesting for me automatically.
But here I just hope that one day you can use boundingbox as the first step to build nesting mechanism inside MoI.

>you will probably need to get some special software for that part.
But today, I think there is no software that can calculate "3D Nesting".
Most of nesting software only for 2D flat nesting. Can you please refer to me software that can work like what I have described in my first post of this thread ?

Thanks Michael :)

Hi Anis,
Selecting all of the objects will put a bounds data label in the selection properties area. You can arange all your objects like you want in the viewport and then select the whole batch and look at the size of box you need.

Hi Anis,

> I am aware that boundingbox cant calculate nesting for
> me automatically.
> But here I just hope that one day you can use boundingbox as the
> first step to build nesting mechanism inside MoI.

Yeah but all the steps that come afterward are difficult.


> Can you please refer to me software that can work like what
> I have described in my first post of this thread ?

I'm not directly familiar with any myself. But just do a Google search on something like "software for 3d nesting" - by just doing that search I found this one:
http://www.tecsol3d.com/materialise/prod05.htm

You may want to direct your search towards STL processing software, since it looks like that may be more common in that area for optimizing the placement of 3d parts that will be generated in a rapid prototyping machine.

Also you might try looking for research papers for 3D nesting and see if that leads you to any products that were produced by the authors of the papers.

- Michael

Hello,

Some low cost packages to do package design, load planning and optimization. I have no experience with any of them, and in no particular order, but will eventually use one of them in the next few months:

http://www.koona.com/

http://www.topseng.com/

http://www.coptimal.com/

http://www.softtruck.com/

http://www.cargooptimizer.com/

There are also a group of higher cost options out there, but I won't bother researching those since I will not utilize those features for the foreseeable future.