A considerable amount of my work I prove in 3d printing prior to making. I have a Stratsys Dimension. The software that comes with this machine appears to nest the stl files to use as much support material as possible in the most uneconomic way (for me, both in time and money!). Therefore I have started nesting in MoI and then exporting as a single stl file as opposed to the individual components. This is very easy if your components are straight and square but very different if the forms are organic.

What I was wondering was if there is either anyway to make a script so that the pieces to be nested can miss each other by a specified amount. Almost like forming a box the size of the print window and dropping the components in, giving it a bit of a shake and hey presto economic use of material with my printer!

Also with different shape forms it is very annoying that all overhangs are filled with support material when another form you want nest perfectly underneath this saving a large amount of time, money and support material!

James Elliott

Hi James, re: script for nesting - it's probably not very feasible for a MoI script to do that since it would involve some kind of analysis of the geometry and that type of stuff doesn't have anything currently set up in the script interface.

But maybe some other software would do a better nesting job than the Stratasys one - but I'm not familiar myself with that topic to know where to look. Maybe someone else will be able to make a suggestion.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your reply, unfortunately Stratsys have locked this machine to this software and there doesn't appear to be any way around it!

Thanks for your rapid response as usual!

James E

It looks like netfabb supports Stratasys Layers (slices), maybe you can get a trial to see if it would work.

Costs determined a heap ?!

Have you tried Autodesk's Meshmixer? Free and pretty easy to use.

Michael T.

Thanks Chris, I have had a quick look, the only thing I can get into Stratsys with is a stl or a cmb file......

James Elliott

Hi Eddi,

This film is exactly what I am looking for however only windows I think....

James Elliott

I use Netfabb to repair files, but have never used it for nesting parts or in conjunction with a 3d printer.

It looks like Netfabb can generate support structures, so perhaps these can be exported with the nested parts, all saved out as an STL.

I have had 4 or 5 different makes of printers, all apart from Stratsys that you can use different software with if you like, however maybe the trade off is that you never get failures, well I haven't so far, approx 2000hrs printing...

James Elliott