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:

  • EmilieEvansOPEnglish
    11·
    6 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·
        6 months ago

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

    • carzianEnglish
      1·
      6 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·
        6 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: