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:
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: