Nesting Utility Hands-On

BOB VAN DER DONCK: Welcome to the Nesting Utility lab. This is the first time we present Nesting Utility to such a large audience, I think, at Autodesk University. It's a relatively young product. I just want some raise of hands to know who is using nesting utility today. A couple of hands, OK.

Who has experimented with it or examined it? Couple. All of you Inventor users, or they're using different software? Inventor base, OK, cool. I will not do this alone. I'm Bob Van der Donck. I'm the UX expert that designed the software, but I have assistance of many of my colleagues, and I want to ask them to come up very quickly to the front and I'll present them one by one.

Ravi, Ravi, Mike, Wilson-- just for one minute so that people know who you are. So I will generate more questions than I can answer, but those are the guys that will answer the questions behind my back, OK? So Mike Spellman is the director of the fabrication and composites. Without him, we wouldn't be sitting here today. I can tell that very clearly.

And so the second in line is Ravi. Ravi is a product manager for the cutting solutions at Autodesk. Wilson in the back there is a developer that one of the developers on the product. He notably made the Vault implementation that you will be working with today. And we have Bob Holland there who is hiding there in the corner is product support representative, and we need his help definitely as well today.

So it's a packed agenda. I don't know if you've been to other labs at Autodesk, but I will guide you very strictly because there is-- we have 40 pages to go through. I don't think we can do it all, but the idea was to give you a handout that you can use when you step outside of the class and fill up the gaps with your own data set. So is that OK? So I might be skipping things, but I hope I can give you the core thing of the utility.

So the first thing has nothing to do with Nesting Utility, but because we will be using Vault you need to prepare your machine in this manner a couple of steps. So I'll show you that on my machine.

So you need to find the Autodesk data management server on your machine, and you can probably find it here. It will be sitting there. Data management server console, and then browse to the Vault node. Go down all the way here to where it says Vault, and then right click on there and enable the Vault.

To get into this console, use whatever defaults you can get. There's no password anywhere. Most of the username is administrator of Vault. We are very non secretive here in this application. So just use default here and then you're good to go. And then you don't have to worry about this Vault server anymore. So this is an essential step you have to go through. It's not the most pleasant step, but we have to do this in the way they're set up.

So just to guide you where the files are, so there is on the C drive there is a data set folder. And you just pick the folder that says Nesting Utility hands on. Everything's there, so the PDF that I'm showing here on the left is there. So I recommend that you open that on your session as well so that you can follow step by step what I'm doing here. All the data files are one level down. It's under slot machine, and they sit a little bit deep. It's in Workspaces, Workspace.

So that is the main assembly we will inheriting data from. We will not use that file itself, but I'm just going to open it to just show you. So please familiarize yourself with the locations of those files because we will be using several of the sub assemblies of this assembly.

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So the first one we will use is this one here, and I want to show you it's the slot stand, it's sort of the support of the assembly. And if you rotate it, you can see that there is-- it's all wood, but the black parts are very tiny rubber coverings of the wood. And as you can see in the corners, there are also very triangular support for the corners. And I'll show you how to deal with those different elements in an automatic fashion.

So once we know what we're dealing with, let's close everything. And let's step here to the creation of a nest initially. So there are three methods of creating a nest is like one method that uses the ribbon, another method that uses the context menu on a part or an assembly that's open, and a third method that use the New menu. And we will explore each of these three access methods.

So the first method will be from the ribbon. And I should say from the ribbon when no document is opened. So I'm in a zero doc state, as we call it. Nothing open. So you can then go to the Nesting ribbon and click on the Nesting command to initiate a nesting session.

And that opens a nesting environment with the default nesting template. So it's all based on templates, and the template is different from an assembly or a part template. So we create our own file format, which is inest, and this is the default template. So initially, what I would suggest is to just move around with the panels. The panels might not be in the way you want them like here. I have already a problem with-- I don't know why this one is here sitting here.

So let me move this out. So we have here the nesting browser, and there's a calculate panel. It's a docking panel. You can put it left or right, trying to-- so now I docked it to the right. But I suggest that you put this calculate panel below the browser here and make it a little bit wider so that you see all the columns. That's my preferred setup to work with Nesting Utility, but of course, you can modify if you want.

So in the ribbon there are a couple of-- the whole utility has maybe four to five commands that you have to be using. So it's not a super complex software as far as number of commands. And the three most important ones are at the beginning of the ribbon. The other two important ones are at the end of the ribbon, the library and the options. And we will use all of these.

So to start the nest you take the first command in the ribbon, which gives you something like this. And I need to draw your attention to that dropdown. Initially, if you wouldn't have the Vault installed you wouldn't see that drop down. But when you have Vault installed, you can get files from the Vault.

And that's what we're going to do here. Just use-- no password, just use the defaults. And please follow me along because I will not give you much opportunity to experiment, unfortunately. So then browse to the location where that slot stand is. It's called slot stand something, here it is. And that's the assembly. Just open it up and check out everything so that we have everything in writable mode on our local drive.

So what you see here is we do a lot of things automatically. So the Sources dialogue detects the materials in the assembly. It also detects the thickness of each wooden part in the assembly, and it creates a material with that combination of, in the first case, rubber and a certain thickness.

So the assembly has three different materials, three different thicknesses, in this case. Just say yes here, and just let him do his course. It might be tempting to click OK, but don't click OK until you are at 100% here in the progress bar. Now you'll find the green check mark will also tell you if something happened or not. I think in this case, this assembly is pretty simple so it should all be processing OK.

And then once you are at 100%, just click OK. So right now, as you can see nothing is created in the graphics. The browser is being prepared for notes, but we are not creating the notes yet until you press OK. So that's a good lesson for the future steps. Always go through the OK button to preserve what he just did.

So let me see where I am because I'm going fast here. So I'm at step i here in the document. So initially what you see here is all the extracted shapes from the wooden panels and from the rubber. There's no distinction here between rubber or wood. And so that's why I ask you in the next step here to change something. I'm not seeing enough myself, so-- OK.

So one of the things I would like him to do is go to the ribbon and in the options here just make this a little bit bigger. So the options dialogue has some preview capability here, but these are all the parameters you can set. And when you set things here the preview will change. So one of the things I want you to do is on the sources check this check button, sources arranged by material, and then click OK.

Now you'll see that each row represents a material. And even to make it even clearer is that you can go here to material. In the color dropdown here you can colorize your parts by material. So process library, for instance, you will see that material number two is that pink and then material number three is that dark green. And then there is that light green which is maybe not very visible, so let's go there. If I can find it.

You see that light green are those corner pieces. That's the third material. And we will get rid of that because it's not-- you don't want to nest that. You probably cut that. There's a different fabrication process for those corners.

So the other thing I want you to explore is step I in that the second command here is-- oops-- so the second command here is nesting properties. That is sort of the result of what we just did. It shows all the properties of the shapes you brought in and it shows the quantity. So there were probably 12 corner joints in that assembly. So we extract a bill of material quantity in Nesting Utility.

And you will also notice that the background is gray. That means that you cannot influence the quantity in this dialogue. So we're at the mercy of how you define your BOM in the assembly in Inventor. And we did that deliberately so that you cannot tweak at this point. I'll show you how to tweak it later on.

And then the other thing-- so here is the material column. So you see here there is rubber, wood, maple, and then the different thicknesses. So it's all expected here, but I just want to show you the dialogue because this dialogue is your friend. And it also sets the tone for the nesting. So whatever you defined here as properties, they will be propagated and used in the nest.

So the other thing you could do is use the context menu and drag up. This is another way of verifying the properties of a particular shape. So you see here quantity one, priority, et cetera. It also gives you some measuring information. All this is written with transient graphics, so you cannot measure on these shapes. So this is the only way to get information about the length and the width of a shape. And there is another way of doing it, but that comes later on.

So right click and move up to get to Properties. I won't be using marking menu a lot, but just that you're aware that the capability is there. If you prefer to use the marking menu, you can use it. Are we good so far? Is there any stumbling blocks yet? No, OK. Let's move on.

So let's check the materials that were created. So in the process material library, the materials-- so the material number one is a generic material of a thickness of 0.12 inch, three millimeter for the metric guys. You get that for free because it sits in the template. So don't worry about that first material. It's only the three others that were generated automatically.

So if I ask here in step O to change length and width of the packaging of those materials-- so packaging is really the size of the sheet from which you're going to nest or cut. When I ask you to set the length to 150, you can do it here. And do 50 is fine, but I have three materials to do.

So a better way of doing that is go into the top node in that dialogue and go to the Packaging tab, and that shows you all the packagings for all your materials. And then if you want to set everything to 100 inch length, you Shift select and then click multi edit. I just stop here quickly because you will be using multi edit quite a bit. Because the chance is high that you're dealing with a lot of shapes, a lot of rows in those tables. So please familiarize yourself with the Shift select and multi edit.

And the multi edit will take the first selected cell as input value. So here my first selected set was 100 inch. If I now click OK, it fills in everything. So I'll do it again, with that 50 inch there, multi edit, OK. Very fast way of multi editing or copying.

You can, of course, do copy and paste. That's still there, but I think it will go slower. I shouldn't have done that. So again for me, this is beginner error, really.

So this was really step one, preparing the shapes and preparing the material and the packaging. So the next step is to actually-- step two here is creating the nesting study. And so right now we have the Sources node here and create the nesting study. That's come command number three here.

And this is the nesting study dialogue. It's a very busy dialogue. Don't be afraid from it because probably the only thing you need to do is hit OK and the nest will be created. But before we do that, I want to show you a couple of things here.

So first of all, these things are draggable. So the idea was to really drag this up to-- but we didn't do it all the way up. You can also drag things left right because there might be a lot of columns here. The only thing I want to do here is those corner joints here. I don't really need. them in my nest, so I could eliminate them by unchecking this, of course.

Or I could go in here, packaging number four is that two inch thing-- this is the packaging for those corner joints. I could right click on that row, and delete that row, and keep an eye on that checkbox here if I do a delete here. So it automatically eliminates all the rows that were using that packaging. And then the only thing left left to do is leave this checkbox on and hit OK.

And there you have your nest. So you have two nests, and each nest as one sheet here, as you can see. And each nest has items underneath. Let's move on here unless there are questions or problems in the audience.

So because we're at Vault, I want to show you the whole process with Vault and show you that the nest file remembers the relationship with the original source file. So we're going to save this document. You can name it whatever you want. We increment the value with one.

And then you can go to the Vault menu and do a check in. So you see here from that Vault dialogue that you not only bring-- puts the inest file in the Vault, but also all source files that were used to generate my nest. So that's one way of verifying that the Vault connection or the relationships are maintained, and just hit OK. And then the nest and its files are checked back in. So that's really all you need to know for nesting, in my opinion, to go quick and dirty. So everything that I'm going to tell you now is more detail, more special things. OK, cool?

So let's go-- one quick thing about is this visible, I'm not sure. So what I did here in chapter 2 is just showed the terminology. So I think with this file up I just want to quickly show it here. Let me sit down for a second.

So you have here the source section, the nesting study. We can have more than one nesting study in a document so that you can compare nests if you want. Under the sources we have source files and we have shapes. So this is what we call a shape.

Under the nesting study, we have a couple of nests-- this is a nest. And the nest has a report, and a nesting report, and a sheet. And under the sheet we have sheet items. So that's the terminology we use, and that's what I'm trying to explain here in this text snippet here.

Like I said before, the thickness, although we started from a apart in Inventor with certain thickness, there is zero thickness here if you look on the side view. So keep that in mind when you're working in this environment, the notion of thickness is not visually communicated here.

Then auto zoom, you've seen me use it all the time. I would certainly recommend leaving it on because the auto zoom is really the finding window of Inventor for Inventor users. The finding window is the same thing but requires two clicks. The auto zoom require one click. You just-- if you turn this thing on, you can click through the browser and he zooms in to the entity that you clicked. And it works on everything-- nest, on the source file, and so on and so on.

So I would recommend leave this on. A couple of other things, the way to access the commands if you have, for instance, a nest here. If you want to edit the nest, you have three ways of editing a nest. You can either use the Properties context menu that gives you the edit nest dialogue; or you can click the note and then go to Edit, see exact same thing; or what I prefer to use is double click. And I think double click goes fast, and it's the same paradigm as the rest of Inventor. So please explore those three different access methods.

Let me move on. Another thing I want to mention is you have-- the display can get very busy. Like you see here we show the efficiency, the number of parts, number of sheets. So if you don't want to see all that information for some reason, if you want to make screenshots or something, you can turn off certain things. Like I can turn on the dimensions, I can turn off the header information, or I can turn off any annotation and fabrication info. So I only have geometry here sitting with the plate border.

And that can be done from the Object Visibility dropdown. What I also want to show here in this chapter is that there is a dual relationship between this dropdown here and certain settings here. So if you see dimensions here enabled, it's because I clicked that button there. So I can re-display the dimensions by using that checkbox.

The same is true for the other settings. Like Header, I enable it. I can take the opportunity to add three columns, for instance, through the header. I can add maybe the thickness at the top of my result and then click OK. So now you see that I have three columns-- column 1, column 2, column 3. Thickness sits here, it's my extra property. So just to tell you that you can modify the display as much as you like so there's a lot of flexibility here.

And let's move on to more interesting stuff. So I think the next method of creating a nest is probably more comfortable and can be used anywhere without the Vault workflow. But before we do that, a couple of things that I think unfortunately that I need to stress. So the things to keep in mind are bolded.

So for the Inventor sheet metal parts are recognized, but on the condition that there is a flat pattern in the file. We are not creating a flat pattern for you. So it's your responsibility to make sure that there is a flat pattern in the sheet metal file. We've had pushback on it, but probably Mike would like to do that differently, but this is the way it is today.

The other thing is we have some implicit rules to detect shapes, and the first rule is that we look for last unconsumed visible sketches. And every word is important in that sentence. So it's the last sketch, should not be in an extrusion, and should be visible. If there is not such a thing, we fall back on the other rule, which is the first known suppressed extrusion in your file. So we detect that as well for nesting.

And then on top of that, there are other-- we can also do this with STL meshes in part files. For derived parts, you have to be very careful. We are not peaking in the parent derived part for sheet metal for instance, so we only look at the derived part itself. If there is a sketch in a derived part, we will pick it up. But if the derived part is from a sheet metal part, we will not detect the flat pattern in the parent part. So be careful with derive.

Then on top of the automatic rules, there are also some explicit shape extraction rules, I call it, where you as a user can define where the nesting thickness comes from and which feature you want to use for nesting. And we will use that later on. And then I already mentioned that the bill of material quantity dictates what we use as source quantity.

You can use overrides to tweak quantity in the Inventor assembly, and there are certain methods to not nest a part. And you can set the quantity to zero, something I wouldn't recommend. You can disable sources or you can delete sources. So a couple of things, and we will have a better mechanism soon, as well.

So then the other concept I want to highlight here-- and we already saw it here in the sources here I think. And let me see if I can-- [INAUDIBLE] didn't see it. Let me go back. Here it is.

So we have a column here on the sources dialogue which is called the source provider. So in this case it's obvious we used an Inventor part, but there are other form of sources that you can use. And you can find the provider dialog that-- then here we sort of hidden it under the Manage panel because we thought that you only use it once, set it for all, and then forget about it. So feel free to bring this up.

Move this to the main panel if you want think you want to use it more. So the providers here for different file formats, these are the automatic rules we use. And they also are shown in the order in which they are used. So if we first try to detect the sheet metal filing on IPT, then we go for a composite file, not relevant for this session here. And then in the third instance we use for sketches and extrusions, which we call Inventor part, and then the last option if everything else fails, we go for a generic part-- a body or something.

So that's the order, and you can influence the order. You can say, I can move this up and things like that. So those are the providers that give you those automatic rules. There is a log file-- we will talk about the log file later on.

So let's try a different way of creating a nest from a different assembly. So I'm going to close this one here for now, and I wanted to bring up that bill validator part. So you can get it from the Vault or from your disk drive. Doesn't matter, really.

So this is the bill validator part. As you can see from the browser, it is a mix of regular Inventor parts, and sheet metal parts, and even some Wellmans. So clearly a mixed assembly.

So once you have that assembly up, you can-- this second method of accessing a nest is through the context menu. So there is-- on the root node of the browser you can click on Create Nest. And that opens automatically a template file, and I think we're going to use default here, the default template.

It brings you in the same environment, opens up the sources dialogue and everything is really automatic. Just reply yes. You see here already that there are a couple of things here. So you get-- if you click in the browser, you get there's some problems here with this part. Just say-- you can also click on the error log to see the same messages, but just click OK. It is fine to work with errors. So in this case, you can still proceed with nesting although there are certain parts that are problematic. So you just need to clean them up or eliminate the file. So-- oops.

So here we have much more materials, as you can see, in this assembly. So the Wellman base, trying to locate it. Let's see the file. You can always go back to the source of dialogue and see-- and I'm not seeing what I was planning on seeing, so I think we're good here. So Wellman base here.

So you can always go back to the Inventor file by clicking on the context menu. So if I open up and verify-- so I think I made one mistake. I just allowed-- so this clearly is a case where the sheet metal file doesn't have a flat pattern in it, so I was expecting an error on that one. But I didn't turn off the appropriate settings. So my mistake here.

So let me go back to provide us here. And I just want to zoom in on sheet metal. I forgot this step. So let me remove everything, it's my error. So I can delete all sources. I do this again. So I do Create Nest. Because I already have a nesting document open, I want to use that existing document to proceed.

But now you get a different error. So that's the error I was expecting, so it's complaining about that sheet metal file that has no flat pattern in it. So then it's just a matter of opening that file. You see, didn't even collect the shape from it. So just open the file, create a flat pattern, sure, and save that file again.

So it is important to save if you make modifications. Otherwise Nesting Utility will not pick it up. So I think I'm good here. So now you get this refresh icon here, and you could perfectly go to the sources dialog and click Start Extract, but a faster way is to right click on the file you just modified and do the start extract. That spares you one extra step. And now you see that file, he recognized that flat pattern. So here is my file that came in.

So for sake of time-- OK, so here's another one that I want to draw your attention to. let's keep this for now. Let's skip this task 4-3, I don't have it here. OK let's do it. Let's open this bill validator guide for a second. Not sure where it sits. Ah, here it is.

So I'll open this. So this part-- you can look at this part in two ways. You can look at it this way or you can look at it in this way, and it could represent different fabrication methods. So if you want to machine this part with this profile, you can force Inventor or Nesting Utility to look at and use this cross section. And the only thing you need to do is add a sketch and project everything.

And so there's the sketch I will be using. And the other thing you can do, and you can then say here there's a context menu called use for nesting. So here you're going the manual way of defining the shape. So you say use for nesting, and then you have to define the thickness as well in this file. And the thickness-- you can either measure, you can say I want to measure, for instance, this line as my extrusion thickness and copy it so you can perfectly do that. And then say I want to use that 2-2-2 millimeter in this part.

And there is another context menu on the root of the browser where you can set that thickness and you can paste it in. And now you're really guiding him, say use this yellow sketch, and use that thickness that I just defined. And you can even go one step further and the result of that nesting thickness step that I just did is this the creation of a nesting thickness parameter. That is an Inventor parameter you can work with.

And you can use formulas in this parameter, as well, so you can make it associative. If in the future your thickness changes, you could assign that thickness to a parameter. Like you could say, for instance, I go to my first sketch and I-- this is the parameter that I think will change a lot. So that's parameter D 55 that I'm creating here.

You could at that point just use that sketch, that parameter D 55, here in that nesting thickness and say this is D 55. And you can give it an overshoot or something. So make it a little bit bigger so that you can shave off-- you have some material to work with as a stock or whatever. So now you have a parametric nesting thickness that changes whenever your file changes. That's what I'm trying to explain here in these steps.

Another one here is this part here is the build validator part. It's not really a part that is this one here. It's not really a part that you will nest, so it's probably something you will buy. So you don't want to include that build validator in you're nesting.

So if I go back to my nesting doc here, so there is your build validator. There's the latch, sorry. Maybe it's already out. Well anyway, what I'm trying to explain is if you want to avoid a part from being nested you can disable it, you can uncheck this enabled state. That's another way of eliminating a part from a nest.

So the last step before we go to something more ambitious is custom templates. So we've already seen materials, packaging, and other parameters that show up. So you don't want to redefine those things every time over and over again. So the best thing that I can suggest is just create a new template. And you can do that starting from the one that we provide, and you just set forever the setting that you want.

And the settings that I would probably want the most are some materials and packaging. So let's do that here. Need a little bit more room here.

AUDIENCE: Question for you.

BOB VAN DER DONCK: Yes?

AUDIENCE: I've noticed-- I've been using it pretty much since it released, and I noticed that [INAUDIBLE] you can't bring it into custom material [INAUDIBLE] because it pulls the material from the Inventor material library, it doesn't take a whole lot of custom materials that I used for nesting and [INAUDIBLE]. Is there no way to be able to pull source information from the custom material library?

BOB VAN DER DONCK: And that custom information is sitting in ADSK lib file, so you have your own? And that is-- that file is the active material in your project?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

BOB VAN DER DONCK: It should recognize those.

AUDIENCE: Every time I try to nest it, it comes in and says it's [INAUDIBLE] the material doesn't recognize [INAUDIBLE]

BOB VAN DER DONCK: OK. You need to talk to Wilson there because I think that a bug for you, Wilson. Sorry. So we don't recognize-- what this gentleman is saying, we don't recognize custom material libraries, even although they are the active.

AUDIENCE: That's the scenario when it tries to bring in a blank material, or does it just find a default value?

AUDIENCE: It assigns default [INAUDIBLE] thickness. But it comes in a generic [INAUDIBLE]

BOB VAN DER DONCK: And did you try this with the latest update, the 2019 2.1?

AUDIENCE: We did a-- on the last update, a hotfix was made available last Friday. And that does fix an issue with the [INAUDIBLE] import, so that was the scenario where it brings in a blank value.

BOB VAN DER DONCK: So check-- I just brought up the About dialogue, so check if you have the 2019.2.1. That's definitely better than when we had a week ago. It could very well be a bug still.

So what I would do in the template is store a couple of materials, a couple of packaging, and the providers that I want to use. So that's what we're going to do here quickly. So just bring up a new document, and we use the process library here. I can add the material.

And you have here-- once you have a new material, you can add from provider. And add from provider is the gateway to collect Inventor materials in your template. So in this case, I'm just going to collect one material from the Inventor library or from your active library if everything would work fine. And you see, now the provider of this material is Inventor and the remote material-- remote is between brackets because it's local-- is aluminum 60 61.

You're free to change this here and/or call this differently, but I prefer to work with default settings here for time sake. So that's the way to bring in Inventor materials in your environment, and we'll take the opportunity to set some settings. So for this material, this aluminum, you can set certain nesting parameters.

So what we set here is that we allow the rotation of shapes on this material, and we have the material grain at 0 degrees frame width, [INAUDIBLE]. So item separation 0.2, for instance. So the thickness of this material I want to set to 0.0625 and so on and so on.

And I even ask to not allow the rotation, and I do that for a particular reason. I want to influence the orientation in another manner later on. So I think we're good here.

So every material can have one or more packagings. So the first one I define relatively small size packaging, and I'll leave it rectangular. We have a roll as well, but we're not going to use roll, which has an infinite length. And the second packaging I make a little bit wider. So I give 200 by 100.

And I increase the cost a little bit. Cost is just a value. Think of it as a value per square inch or square millimeter. It has no voluta connotations. So don't think of it as euro versus dollar, just a number. So for the Europeans in the room it will represent euros, for the Americans probably dollars. But anyway, the wider material has a higher cost in my mind.

So one thing I forgot to mention, that you see the bold versus the not bold. The bolded packaging is the one we use by default when you create the nest. So no questions asked we use that one if you have an aluminum 60 61 with that thickness.

So the other thing you probably want to do in that template is go to the providers and say, I'm not interested in extrusion of sketches, I just want flat patterns from sheet metal files. And that you set out here, and then you can save this file as a template. Save copy as template. And you call it something like only sheet metal or whatever. And you have to do this once and for all, and then you're set.

So we can now open up another document here. Let's close all documents at this point because we don't need all these. So we're going to test our new template on a file called cabinet.im, so let's open up that cabinet. It sits conveniently in a cabinet folder. Sure, it's out of date for some reason.

I'm checking out everything so that I can do modifications so you can at any-- oh, it's-- only this one is checked out, OK. So now we're going to use that template on the cabinet here. And instead of the default template, we use that only sheet metal template that I created.

So as you can see here, there is no question asked about the aluminum 60 61, and I know for a fact that there is 60 61 in the assembly. But the fact that we prepared that material in the template, you wouldn't see any questions or any notifications about that material. That's the idea about if you use the same material over and over again, once it's in the template it will no longer come up in this dialogue.

So this assembly will also have a couple of issues, and I've done that deliberately. So it finished with a couple of issues-- there is an issue here. Shape doesn't close, and I think there is-- oh, this is the only one? OK. So now we only bring in the sheet metal files here.

So you see here there is-- one of the parts here, I'm highlighting it, is not really coming in properly. And it's called the Wellman door rip, so I'm going to correct that. So I'm opening that file, and the reason is really in the flat pattern there is a zigzag here. Not sure if you see it. That zigzag is causing problems, so I'm going to be very wild and I'm just going to cut away that zigzag by just a small cutout.

So I'm suppressing this sketch here, and now you see it's a straight edge. So I saved my corrected geometry. I demonstrate this just to show you that you can do geometry changes in your Inventor files and they will propagate to the nest or to the extracted shape.

So I save this, go back to my nesting document. This one clearly is asking for update, so I do a start extract. And now he comes in, should be coming in OK. So he now recognize the shape. And this would also work if this part would have been nested already.

So now we've got a nest-- this is a more ambitious project, I would say. So we've gone and nest this, great nesting study. And I'm just checking here. Oh, what we're going to do here is we're only going to nest the aluminum 60, 61 of that certain thickness. So I just want to show you how you can filter. There's a lot of things you can do in the context menu here, but one of the things is I'm going to deselect everything, and I'm going to filter on a thickness that 0.06 et cetera, and only take material that is aluminum 60, 61.

So now in this dialog I have filtered to this set, and then I'm not selecting them yet. So I have to shift select the rows and add these files. So these will be the files-- the only files that will be nested. And if I now do a clear all filters, you will see that there are many more files. But only the-- there is a subset that is selected for nesting. So please make yourself familiar with this filtering mechanism because it's powerful if you're dealing with hundreds of files.

So we can now do our nesting. As expected, there will be some questions. So some parts will cause problems, and we'll figure out what that means. So when there is an error in the nest, you can always see an exclamation mark come up with some tooltip. So it clearly tells you that the monitor housing might be too big to fit on the sheet.

So let's have a look at the monitor housing. Where is it? So first of all, we can go in the nesting properties and look at monitor housing wherever-- here, here it is. So what I prefer to do is add some extra columns in there. Like for instance, the area. So I add the area column to this dialog.

Initially we didn't want to show that, but-- where's my-- OK. Ah, here it is. I'm going to drag it to the beginning so I don't have to work. You see the number of properties we're dealing with, so we didn't want to show them all. But you can bring them in, for instance, for these type investigations where you can say like the monitor housing from that aluminum is probably the part with the biggest area. And you can therefore correct this.

And we will correct it by bringing in a larger packaging, so that's the next step. Oh, one thing I forgot to mention. These views you can save. So you can say this is my area view, and so you can use this in any other session of Nesting Utility as your area view. So you can apply either the default view or you can apply your custom views. So we remember the columns, the column position, et cetera.

So let's correct this problem by editing the nest. I double click on nest here, and you see we have here a packaging for sitting and I can bring that in in the nesting. And it is clearly the larger packaging. So I hope that would solve the problem to also nest that bigger file. Let's test it out. So now no complaints, but he pushed that bigger part on that larger plate, of course.

So then a couple of things we can play with. Let's see. You can change the quantity. So we can-- because you probably want to not just make one of these assemblies but make 10 of them in the job. So I'm just changing the quantity here on an existing list and let him recalculate.

So these are the things you see. Much more sheets get created, but it takes the smaller packaging first and then the bigger one. And that's because I had created material uses as much as listed. So he first goes for the small one, and when that is depleted or when he cannot satisfy the sheet size versus the part size he goes to the bigger one. And you can change it to do make the best size, I think there's still a problem with that, but let's do best mix just see what he does there.