Short overview of how good the nesting capabilities of various 3D slicer are.
The task is simple: placing as many of these shapes on a 200x300mm printed as possible. Manual (quick and dirty for reference): 6 pcs.
Ranking:
- Ultimaker Cura: 7 pcs.
- human (me): 6 pcs.
- Orca slicer: 5 pcs.
- PrusaSlicer & BCN3D stratos: 4 pcs. By switching (for this particular part) from the worst (Prusa) to the best (Cura) slicer the nesting performance improved by a whopping 75%!
Ultimaker Cura:
Prusa:
BCN3D Stratos (forked from an old version of Cura):
OrcaSlicer:
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Keep in mind that if you slice multiple parts to be printed at a time, then a failure on one part means the whole batch is potentially compromised.
I have the most experience with PrusaSlicer, and have used the multiple part one at a time option to print multiple parts at once. You have to tell it the dimensions of your extruded head, so it doesn’t crash the part , and if you have a bed slinger, you have to be careful of your x axis bar (ie, order it so it starts at the front if the bed and works it way to the back)
With mainsail and klipper, you can cancel one failed part mid print and keep going on the rest of the parts.
You can do that on the Prusa. The firmware let you cancel a part mid print but continue the rest.
You can also cancel individual objects on Prusa MK4 and Mini by default.
Did you turn on Automatic Rotations in Prusaslicer? By default it’s left off and just tiles your part when you duplicate it.
Default settings. Where is the option to rotate it?
Providing it manually with 90° rotated and using the auto arrange instead of fill bed: 5 pcs. Still not a great result.
There’s also a setting for minimum spacing between parts. The default is overly cautious iirc, I’d suggest lowering it and trying again, though I don’t expect it to change much
Improved but still not a match to Ultimaker Cura.
Prusa is very slow compared to Cura as PrusaSlicer needs every option checked including Geometry handling accurate to sometimes get 7 pcs. matching Cura performance. If the result is 7 or 6 pcs. depends on where the part originally was placed on the print bed (or luck? run to run variance?). Not a reliable software for nesting.
With fast and balanced setting it only does 6 pcs.
fast:
balanced:
accurate:
