Advice

I recently had the chance to test a new plugin for Rhino called RhinoNest. This is an amazing plugin that allows you to select contours from your 3d object and automatically lay them out. It’s very useful if you plan on laser cutting any object you’ve modeled by need quick and accurate contours extracted. Here’s a walk-through of what I ended up doing

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Select your object you wish to slice up. Select ‘Slice 3D’ from the RhinoNest-Tools menu.

Enter the distance you want the contours. At this stage you can also select the “Type”. “Type” will select how RhinoNest displays layer numbers. You can select ‘dots’, filled ‘text’ or ‘single stroke text’. In this case I selected “SingleStrokeText” which will allow me to laser cut the labels.

Once you complete that operation RhinoNest will lay out all the layers side by side. Manually going through those to put them in an organized fashion could be tedious. Luckily there is a quick way to sort this out.

Here is what the robot model looks like. It makes 2 sets of curves. A set is flattened for cutting and the second set is left on the model for reference.

At this point we want to organize our layers so it will make it easier to cut. We can do that with the RhinoNest Wizard. This is available from the RhinoNest menu and selecting “Optimize Object Position”. Once the dialogue box pops up, choose “Select objects”

In the command line it will ask you to select the curves you wish to optimize. In this case I want to optimize all my curves.

All curves are selected. I hit enter once they are selected and hit escape to get back to the dialogue box.

With the curves selected the dialogue should mention how many objects are selected. In my case, 52. Hit the next button.

Now RhinoNest wants to know what type of sheet to lay the pieces onto. We don’t have any loaded stock so just select “Unique Sheet” for now.

Define your sheet size. In this case I’m using 32”x18” or in other words, the size of the laser cutter bed. Once specified, select ‘Next’.

Now it’s time to let RhinoNest how far we want these parts spaced apart. I want them at least a ¼” from each piece and ¼” from the edge of the sheet. I’ve also selected “Freedom” to be set to “Free” This allows RhinoNest to freely rotate pieces in order to get them to fit onto your stock. If you leave it ‘fixed’ it may not fit all pieces on one board

In the last dialogue window, select ‘execute’. If it all went well you should see “Nesting successful”.  Click “next” and “finish”.

Now we have all of our pieces neatly laid out on one piece of stock measuring 32”x18”. Notice some pieces may overlap or extend past the edge but this can easily be fixed by moving some around. Either way it’s so much easier doing it this way than doing it manually.

Now that these objects are all properly laid out we can export them into an format that Illustrator can read and laser cut. Once laser cut just assemble and this is the end result.