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:

  1. Ultimaker Cura: 7 pcs.
  2. human (me): 6 pcs.
  3. Orca slicer: 5 pcs.
  4. 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:

  • Dem Bosain@midwest.socialEnglish
    6·
    7 months ago

    Did you turn on Automatic Rotations in Prusaslicer? By default it’s left off and just tiles your part when you duplicate it.

    • EmilieEvansOPEnglish
      11·
      7 months ago

      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.

        • EmilieEvansOPEnglish
          3·
          7 months ago

          Thanks. See the other comment for details how now performs.

      • carzianEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        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

        • EmilieEvansOPEnglish
          31·
          7 months ago

          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: