Sheets and nesting

LayerCut packs your pieces onto as few sheets as it can, by their real shapes, and shows you every sheet before you cut.

Panels nested on a 600 by 400 mm sheet — The organizer's five panels on one 600 × 400 mm sheet.

Sheet settings

Setting	Default	What it does
Width and Height	400 × 300 mm	The size of the sheets you cut, or your laser bed's working area if that's smaller.
Edge margin	5 mm	Space kept clear around the sheet's edges.
Part spacing	3 mm	The smallest gap between two pieces.
Allow rotation	On	Lets pieces turn by 90° to fit better.

How nesting works

Pieces are packed by their real outlines, not their bounding boxes, so curved pieces sit close together.
Small pieces nest inside the holes of bigger ones, such as the centers of hollow rings.
Several packing orders are compared, and the one with the fewest sheets wins.
Spacing and margins are never less than your settings.
A piece nested inside another piece's hole is cut before that hole, so it doesn't drop out of position first.
A piece bigger than the sheet isn't squeezed or dropped silently: LayerCut tells you which piece it is, so you can reduce the scale or use a larger sheet.

The top bar shows how many sheets you need and the share of material used. Click it for the size of the strip left over on the last sheet, which you can keep for small jobs.

Reading the Sheets view

Line	Meaning
Red	Cut all the way through.
Blue	Engraved or scored: labels, slot names and guide lines.

Hover over a piece to see its name. Click it to see where it goes in the 3D model. See The LayerCut window for zooming and moving between sheets.