Efficient autonesting pays for itself. It's easy to see how much fabric you're saving and work out the cost difference.
There's also a time saving, sometimes a huge time saving with autonesting. In some industries operators might spend an hour or so tweaking each nest to save a bit of fabric. With autonesting, this is unlikely to take more than a minute or two as a background task on a computer. If you're spending more than a few hundred a week on fabric, you ought to look at good autonesting.
To offer more advanced autonesting options to customers, Aeronaut has partnered with the UK company NestFab to develop a fully integrated multi-tasking background nesting solution. The operator selects the Autonest menu and within a few seconds, a fully nested queue appears in the Tangent window.
"My life just got a bit better after installing NestFab + Ultra-Performance :-)"
There's no need to export or save panels or translate them into different units and open them in another program, the process is transparent to the user and there's no need to see anything other than the Tangent interface.
"The whole upgrade will be paid for in under a year just on the material savings. On top of that comes hours a day in saved labour time."
In many cases, good autonesting is free… or rather the cost of the software (Tangent + NestFab) is paid for with material savings and time savings compare with manual nesting… normally in well under a year. The more expensive the materials you work with, the shorter the payback.
Autonesting is fast. If your fabric comes in different roll widths, it's easy to try a test nest onto different width rolls to see which gives the least waste.
NestFab has the full range of nesting features that customers have asked for including nesting within and across frames, batching nest queues, nesting into closed irregular shapes, fault avoidance, time and efficiency based nesting etc.
A series of short demonstration videos can be seen here: Advanced nesting with NestFab
The combination of Aeronaut's Tangent software and NestFab running under Parallels on the Mac offers the best combination of features, performance and price. Most importantly, the original patterns are not changed in any way by autonesting. Where more complex data types such as splines, arcs and circles are being nested, this may be very important since some autonesting software changes all data types to basic polygons and lines with a resulting poor performance when cutting.
The picture below shows a set of car seat patterns nested into a partially cut hide. Faulty areas of the hide have been marked using Tangent's Fault Line tool. Key patterns have been placed by hand and locked in place and as many of the remaining patterns that will fit have been autonested around the locked patterns.
Where permitted by the fabric rules, patterns can be rotated incrementally to fit. Any patterns which cannot be fitted into a nest are placed in the queue ready for re-nesting into the next cut.
While these features are essential for working with material like leather, they are also great time savers in many other types of work, especially when used with Aeronaut's SiliconEye machine vision software which makes it easy to capture and trace irregularly shaped fabric outlines.
Complex and time consuming nesting tasks are made quick and simple but importantly, in conjunction with Tangent's Fault Line feature, NestFab handles fabric faults as well as locked patterns and nesting into enclosed shapes with ease.
In the picture below, patterns for a hypalon RIB tube are nested to avoid faults in the fabric, shown in red.
NestFab is the best performing nesting engine with the best set of features that we've found and it's very reasonably priced. Good Autonesting software can easily pay for itself with fabric savings. The more expensive the fabric you work with, the better the return on investment.
And unlike other autonesting software, your CAD patterns remain as you drew them. There's no data conversion, no polylines or splines converted to polygons and no data lost or changed in your original nesting queue.