Frequently Asked Questions

The Silhouette Studio® Business Edition provides an Automated Nesting preview mode where shapes are automatically nested within the Media Layout View to provide efficient usage of the material being cut, while maintaining the image's original positioning in the Design View thus allowing the user to continue editing and refining the design.

The Media Layout Nesting option is availabe only when running the Business Edition version in the Media Layout mode.

While the original design can retain its original design layout, the Media Layout Nesting option will provide a method to re-arrange the objects to be cut in a manner that makes the most effective use of your media.

The following options are available in the Media Layout Nesting panel:

Nesting Active - This option turns the feature on or off as desired. The option can be combined with other Business Edition features, such as Tiling and Matrix Copy.

Interlock Shapes - This option will nest concave shapes together in more efficient ways and attempt to interlock them to save more space on your media.

Maintain Grain - When enabled, the nesting feature is constrained to leave images unrotated, or to rotating only by 180 degrees. This may be useful when using specialty media that has a grain in order to ensure the grain runs in the desired direction for the resulting cut out images.

Align - When enabled and images are rotated to an irregular angle in the Design View, the Align option will make the image upright to compensate prior to determining the best angle to nest the shape into.

Whole Words - This option will keep letters from words together which have been created with the Text tool, instead of nesting each individual letter.

Maintain Groups - This option will keep any grouped images in their original grouping rather than nesting each individual object.

Rotations - The Rotations option will allow or restrict the level of angles you may allow the images to be rotated. For example, a Rotations setting of "0" will hold the images exactly in their original angle of rotation whereas a Rotations setting of "2" will allow rotations of 0º and 180º turns for the images. A Rotations setting of "4" will allow images to be rotated at angles of 0º, 90º, 180º, and 270º. As the Rotations setting is raised, the number of possible rotation angles for each image increases. The setting is present because while the highest setting may attempt to make the most effective use of space, there may be instanes where the angle of images is important and it is more desirable to hold images in a certain angle.

Padding - This option controls the minimum distance between two adjacent shapes after they have been nested.