Two layouts can place the same parts with the same material efficiency and still be worlds apart in practice. If the free space is scattered in pockets between parts, it is scrap. If it survives as one clean rectangular strip along a sheet edge, it goes back on the shelf and becomes the start of the next job. The engine now knows the difference.
Offcut continuity
- Tie-breaking on the leftover. When candidate layouts place the same parts with the same area, the engine now prefers the one that spans the smallest footprint — so the leftover stays contiguous instead of fragmenting.
- A final consolidation pass. Every preset ends with a challenge step that tries re-packing the winning layout into tight rows or columns. It is adopted only when it keeps every placed part and every square millimetre of placed area while freeing a strictly bigger strip — your part count and efficiency can never get worse.
- The strip is a first-class result. A clean, two-dimension offcut (say 940 × 2070 mm) is highlighted in green on the canvas with its dimensions, the results panel shows your utilization with the strip excluded (it is not waste if you reuse it), and the exported DXF carries the strip outline and size on a separate OFFCUT layer.
- Nothing is sacrificed. Placing your parts always comes first: the engine never drops a part to make the offcut prettier.
Parts keep their colors
Parts drawn with explicit DXF colors (per-entity true color or a real ACI index) now render in those colors through the whole flow — upload preview, live nest, results, shared links, and the exported files. Colorless parts keep the classic cut-red so nothing changes for plain drawings.
Manual placement, unblocked
- Place first, resolve later. A part can now be dropped even where it does not fit yet — it lands highlighted in red so you can rotate it and shuffle its neighbours until a spot opens, instead of the drop being silently rejected.
- Arrow keys move through tight spots. Nudging no longer refuses to cross an overlapping position, so you can step a part through a crowd to the gap on the far side. Saving and exporting still require every part to sit in a valid spot.