# Cutlist Evolution — full documentation > Cutlist optimizer for sheet, linear and roll materials: minimal-waste layouts, cut diagrams, labels and saw-file exports. Source: https://cutlistevo.com --- # Import Data URL: https://cutlistevo.com/guide/import > Import parts and stock into Cutlist Evolution from CSV, a 3D model, DXF, SketchUp, a spreadsheet, or with an AI assistant. Before you import any data, ensure that your number format is set correctly in the **Options** panel. You cannot use notation (e.g. [ **'** ] or [ **"** ]) in your data, and you must use a single type of unit throughout. Your browser will detect your locale and your thousands and decimal separators will be set accordingly. If you choose to use separators, please use the detected separators in your data. Once the data has been parsed, it will be converted to use decimal separators as [ **.** ] and no thousand separators. Read more about [number format](/guide#number-format). ## Import CSV CSV is a common format which can be exported from any spreadsheet software. The CSV import method attempts to automatically recognise your column headers and match them to the correct fields. There are a few rules you need to follow to make the process work. - You must have a separate sheet for stock and parts and import them individually - indicate which type you're importing using the radio buttons. - Each sheet must have column headers, and they should be the top row of the sheet. - Trim and banding must be in a single cell, separated by a comma (format is Y,N,Y,N for banding and 10,10,10,10 for trim). The order is L1, L2, W1, W2 - read more about [side references](/guide#side-references). - Rotation expects 'L' for length (long side) horizontal and 'W' for width (short side) horizontal. - Grain expects 'L' or 'W'. If grain is not provided, it will be assumed to be 'L' for the long side. You do not have to use all of the available column headings if you don't use them. The tool will try and automatically detect and map your column headings to the correct field - if this is not successful, you can manually map the columns. After you've dropped your CSV file you will be shown a preview of the data. If it looks ok, click the **Import** button and the data will be imported to the **Inputs** panel. ## Import 3D Model Drop a 3D model - OBJ, STL, PLY, glTF/GLB, 3MF, Collada (DAE) or STEP - and Cutlist Evolution breaks it down into cuttable parts, or send a model live from SketchUp with no file to export. Both live on a page of their own, the **3D model cutlist generator**, reached from the **Import 3D model** button in this panel or from the main menu. It has its own guide: **[3D Model Cutlist Generator](/guide/3d-model-cutlist)**. ## Import DXF DXF is a format commonly used in CAD software. This functionality has been tested with the multi-file exports from CabinetSense and Pro100, but it should work with other exports. One part per file is required for the import to work correctly. ### Supported Part Types The import will attempt to extract parts from the file. Any parts which are not rectangular will be converted to a rectangle using a bounding box. Parts must be **axis aligned**. ### Precision If the detected bounding boxes are not accurate enough or too accurate, you can adjust the precision of the import. ### Store Files for Editing If you would like to create an optimized DXF using these imports as the source, check this option. ### Grain Grain can be set to the long or short side of the stock. By default, the longer side of the stock / part is oriented horizontally. **If using CabinetSense or other software, ensure the grain is set accordingly (long side horizontal = grain horizontal).** ### Drop the File Then simply drop in the DXF file and a preview of the data will be shown in the table. Not all parts will be shown in the list. The length, width, thickness, quantity, name and material will be extracted from the file as supported by the software you're using. ## Paste from Spreadsheet Importing from spreadsheets such as Excel is quick and straightforward. You can copy data from your spreadsheet and paste it directly into the **Import** panel. Ensure you create a sheet with all the columns indicated in the Import panel - leave them blank if not needed. Copy all the values directly from the spreadsheet and paste them into the input field, leaving out any column labels. A preview of your data is generated - if it looks ok then click the **Import** button. Your parts & stock will now be ready to view in the **Inputs** panel. If you're using materials, ensure the stock is imported first with the material specified. Import the parts next, and the materials will be matched to the existing stock items. Once the data has been parsed, it will be converted to use decimal separators as **.** and no thousand separators so make sure your imported data looks correct. ## Import with AI If you have a PDF or photo of a cutting plan, you can let your own AI assistant read it and send the dimensions straight into your cutlist, rather than typing them in by hand. Your assistant does the reading. Cutlist Evolution receives the parts for you to check. This uses [MCP](https://modelcontextprotocol.io) (Model Context Protocol), supported by assistants such as Claude Desktop. It requires an [API plan](/plans), and you connect your **own** assistant, so SmartCut never sees your files. ### One-time setup Open the **Import** panel and choose the **AI** tab. It shows two things to add to your assistant as an MCP server: - **MCP server URL**, the address your assistant connects to. - **Your API key**, which authenticates your assistant. Click **Reveal**, then **Copy**, and keep it private. Add these to your assistant's MCP / connectors settings (see your assistant's own documentation for where that is). ### Importing a plan 1. In the **AI** tab, copy the short **connection code** shown. 2. In your assistant, attach your plan (PDF or image) and ask it to *"import this cutting plan into SmartCut"*, giving it the connection code. 3. Your assistant reads the dimensions and sends them across. The parts appear in a preview in the **AI** tab. 4. Check the parts, editing any value or removing a row as you go, then click **Import**. They're added to the **Inputs** panel. The connection code expires after about 15 minutes. If your assistant says no session is listening, reopen the **AI** tab and give it the new code. Nothing is imported until you confirm, so you always get the final say on what lands in your cutlist. --- # Options URL: https://cutlistevo.com/guide/options > Configure number format, material type, cut type, cut preference and spacing in Cutlist Evolution. ## Number Format Number format can be set to **Decimal** or **Fraction**, please refer to the [number format](/guide#number-format) section for more information. ## Material Type There are several stock type options. 1. **Sheet material** is for use with plywood, MDF, acrylic, or any other sheet materials 2. **Linear material** - selecting this option will remove the width inputs and adjust the visualisation for easier use with long thin materials such as construction timber. When using this option, you can ignore the width measurements on the exports and visualisation. 3. **Roll** is for optimising a single roll of material. The total length of material required is calculated. ## Cut Type There are several cut type options. 1. **Efficiency / CNC** - this is the default option, it will try to use as little material as possible 2. **Guillotine** - this is for use with saws that cut edge to edge in a straight line 3. **Beam / panel saws** - a special setting for computer-controlled saws ## Cut Preference There are several cut preference options available with the **Guillotine** cut type. 1. **Length cuts** - this is the default option, it will cut along the length of the stock first 2. **Width cuts** - will cut along the width of the stock first ## Efficiency / CNC Mode This is ideal if you're using a jigsaw, laser cutter or CNC machine. The algorithm prioritizes layouts with the minimum number of cuts and the least waste. **Part compression direction** - while in maximum efficiency mode - you can choose to suggest how the parts should be stacked - either from bottom to top (stock width), which is the default option, or left to right (stock length). ## Guillotine > Length Cuts This setting is designed for guillotine cutting machines such as table or beam saws when ripping stock. While in a guillotine mode there are several options. - **Stock efficiency** - make the most of the stock, even if it takes a bit longer to make the cuts. - **Time efficiency** - reduce the number of fence adjustments when using a table saw or adjustable stop. ## Guillotine > Width Cuts Use this setting if you prefer guillotine cross-cuts - for example, when using a miter saw or a cross-cut sled on a table saw. The same options are available as for length cuts. ## Minimum Spacing This global minimum spacing setting can only be used with the **Efficiency / CNC** cut type. This setting will ensure that parts are not placed too close together and can be useful when using a CNC machine with a vacuum bed. Minimum spacing operates between parts and the edges of the stock, but will allow parts to be placed exactly on the edges of the stock. ## Dimension Specific Minimum Spacing This setting allows you to set a minimum spacing for parts with a side less than or equal to the **Maximum dimension**. --- # Export URL: https://cutlistevo.com/guide/export > Export your cutting layout from Cutlist Evolution as PDF, DXF, SVG or PTX. ## PDF The PDF export contains a detailed diagram of the layout, including dimensions of each part. An optional table includes information such as part position and banding. If you've used a part trim, the trimmed dimensions and the originals are both shown so you can rough cut the parts before making more accurate cuts. ### Interpreting the PDF Exports - The stock is oriented with the longest sides in the left-to-right direction. - The X and Y positions indicate the bottom left corner of the part. - The W values indicate the shorter dimension of the parts. - The L values indicate the longer dimension of the parts. The key for banding and various other elements is included in the PDF. See [side references](/guide#side-references) for more information. ## Export DXF DXF format is a vector format that can be imported into most CAD software and used by CNC machines. The export can include machining if used. ## Export SVG SVG is another vector format that can be imported into most CAD software and used by CNC machines. ## Export PTX PTX is a format designed explicitly for computer-controlled beam or panel saws. This file can be imported into most beam-saw software, such as Cut Rite or Magi-Cut. --- # FAQs URL: https://cutlistevo.com/guide/faqs > Frequently asked questions about using Cutlist Evolution. **What number format should I use?** See [number format](/guide#number-format) **How do I set part rotation? / Why are parts not oriented correctly?** See [part rotation](/guide#part-rotation) **Why are some of my parts not being placed?** See [stock matching](/guide#stock-matching) **How do I import data?** See [import](/guide/import) **The diagram isn't to scale - what's going on?** If the size of the stock is very long and thin, the y axis will be stretched. You can click 'Reduce y' to switch back to the original aspect ratio. **I'm having issues - what do I do?** See [troubleshooting](https://cutlistevo.com/bugs) --- # Articles URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles > In-depth articles about cutting optimization and best practices These are the articles behind the tool. Some compare cutting optimization software directly. Those benchmarks put the same real and test projects through each tool, so the numbers can be read side by side. Others cover the problem itself, which is older and harder than it looks from outside. If you are choosing software, start with the comparisons and the benchmarks. If you want to know why a layout comes out the way it does, start with [the bin packing problem](/articles/bin-packing-problem). ## Articles - [The best cutlist optimizers in 2026](/articles/best-cutlist-optimizer-2026) - [The best cutting optimization software](/articles/best-cutting-optimization-software) - [Creating a Cut List from Autodesk Fusion 360](/articles/fusion-360-cutlist) - [OptiCutter benchmark](/articles/opticutter-benchmark) - [Comparison with cutlistoptimizer.com](/articles/comparison-cutlist-optimizer) - [Approaches to the bin packing problem](/articles/bin-packing-problem) - [Benefits of cutlist optimization for cabinet builders](/articles/benefits-cabinet-builders) - [Creating a cut list from Shapr3D](/articles/shapr3d-cutlist) - [Setting up a cut-to-size business](/articles/cut-to-size-business) - [How a Cutlist Optimizer works](/articles/how-cutlist-optimizer-works) - [The Future of Cutlist Optimization: From Desktop to Cloud](/articles/cloud-based-optimization-whitepaper) - [The stock cutting problem](/articles/stock-cutting-problem) --- # The best cutting optimization software URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/best-cutting-optimization-software > Discover top cutting optimization software for woodworking. Compare features, precision, and cost-efficiency of leading tools to boost project success. **Cutting optimization software** has one job. Take a list of parts and a supply of sheet material, and work out how to cut one from the other with as little waste as possible. Every tool on the market does that much. What separates them is how well they handle the constraints of a real workshop, what else in your business they will talk to, and what they cost to run over a year rather than on the day you buy. Those three questions are worth more attention than anything on a features page. --- ## What Matters When Choosing Software Six things separate a tool you are still using in a year from one you abandon after a fortnight. ### 1. Accuracy and Precision in Optimization The layout is the product. A tool that fits the same parts onto four sheets instead of five has paid for itself on one job, and that difference comes out of how the software arranges parts on the material. There is a straightforward way to compare candidates. Run one real parts list through each of them and look at the sheet count. That number tells you more than any description of the mathematics behind it. Ask what happens to what is left over, too, because remnant management is what turns yesterday's offcut into today's part. If you cut irregular shapes rather than rectangles, look for true shape nesting, which is uncommon in basic 2D rectangular optimizers. ### 2. User-Friendly Interface (UI) and Experience (UX) Most of the time you spend with an optimizer goes on entering parts, not on admiring layouts. Sheet sizes, part dimensions and quantities should be quick to type in, quicker to change afterwards, and the result should be legible at a glance to whoever is standing at the saw. Drag-and-drop editing, clear visual feedback and a menu structure you can predict all shorten the gap between a change of plan and a new layout. An interface that needs a training course is an interface someone will find a reason to avoid. ### 3. Customization and Flexibility for Diverse Projects Real jobs arrive with constraints, and a layout that ignores them is not a layout. Projects run from simple shelving to fitted cabinetry and one-off furniture, and each brings its own materials and rules. So the software needs to accept variable board dimensions rather than one standard sheet, respect grain direction where the job demands it, compensate for kerf width, allow for edge banding, and let you fix or free part rotation. Beyond that, the useful extras are per-part priorities and handling several material types in a single run, so a carcass in oak ply with an MDF back is one optimization instead of two. ### 4. Integration with Hardware and Other Software Whatever the optimizer produces has to reach the machine that cuts it. Compatibility with CNC machines, automated panel saws and even label printers decides whether that happens as a file or by hand. Check the import and export formats against what you already use, CSV, DXF and G-code among them, and look for API access if you want the optimizer called by another system rather than opened by a person. Every handover that stays digital is one fewer chance to type a number wrong, and one fewer wait between design, optimization and production. ### 5. Reporting and Visualization Capabilities Reports leave the workshop. A material take-off goes to purchasing, a waste percentage goes into the quote, and the cutting diagram goes to whoever is running the saw. Between them they cover planning, last-minute changes and tracking what material actually gets consumed. Look for part lists, cut sequences, waste percentages and costs in a form you can print or send. The visual layout is the one that gets used most, because an operator reading a clear diagram makes fewer mistakes than one reading a table of numbers. ### 6. Cost Efficiency: Investment vs. Return The price is the license plus everything after it. Updates, support, and the hours it takes to get people using it properly. The most expensive option is not automatically the right one, and for a small shop it is usually the wrong one. Work the sum from the other end. Estimate the material and the labor a tool would save you over a year, then compare that with what it costs over the same year. If the saving is not clear on paper it will not be clear in the workshop. --- ## Popular Cutting Optimization Software Options Three tools, picked because they sit in different places rather than because they sit in an order. ### 1. CutList Optimizer CutList Optimizer is best known for being easy to use, and the praise it gets is mostly for the interface. It supports a good range of custom requirements, including varied board dimensions, defining different materials and managing grain orientation, and it generally provides clear visual layouts. That makes it a strong choice for **hobbyists, small-scale professional workshops, and educational institutions** after a straightforward and often cost-effective way to optimize cutting patterns without extensive training first. ### 2. SmartCut SmartCut is not an application you open. It is an **API (Application Programming Interface)** built to put cutlist optimization directly inside an existing website, e-commerce store or custom software, and it is the brain behind online cut-to-size configurators. That suits **medium to large-scale operations, material suppliers, or online businesses** where the cutting has to be quoted and ordered without a person in the middle. A customer enters their sizes, gets an instant quote, and orders custom parts through your own site, with sales and order fulfillment running as one path rather than several. ### 3. Cutlist Evolution Cutlist Evolution is aimed at the harder end of the problem, the jobs with many parts and awkward constraints. It uses **artificial intelligence (AI)** in the optimization and is built for throughput as much as for material utilization. It exports optimized cutting paths directly to automated saws, CNC machinery and other shop floor equipment, so a layout reaches the machine as a file. Advanced remnant management and detailed reporting come with it. That combination is aimed at **high-volume production environments, precision-oriented custom shops, and manufacturers** where material cost and throughput are both under pressure. --- ## Making the Right Choice for Your Workshop Start with the work you actually do rather than the work you might one day take on. Count the parts in a typical job and the jobs in a typical week. A hobbyist cutting one carcass a month and a cabinet shop cutting forty are not shopping for the same tool, and the bigger tool is not the better one. Then check what it has to connect to. List the machines on your floor and the software you already run, CAD and ERP included, and confirm the optimizer will exchange files with all of it. A missing format is a cost you pay on every job, in retyping. Weigh the price against the saving over a year rather than a month, counting material, labor, and the work you could take on that you currently turn away. Then ask what happens if the business doubles. More parts, more materials, another saw. Software that fits today but not in two years costs you the migration as well as the license. Look at what surrounds the product, too. Documentation, tutorials, a support address that replies and an active user community are worth as much as a feature when something goes wrong at four in the afternoon. The comparison that settles it is not a feature table. Take one real job, with the material and grain constraints it came with, run it through each candidate, and compare three things: the sheet count, the time it took you to enter, and how readable the layout would be to the person at the saw. Cutting optimization is easy to make claims about and quick to test, so test it. A YouTube video discussing the best free cutlist optimizer tools --- ## Related Articles - [How cutlist optimizer works](/articles/how-cutlist-optimizer-works) - [Cut list optimization for cabinet builders](/articles/benefits-cabinet-builders) - [The best nesting software](/articles/best-nesting-software), Deepnest, SVGnest, Autodesk and Nest&Cut compared --- # Cut lists from Autodesk Fusion 360 URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/fusion-360-cutlist > Turn an Autodesk Fusion 360 model into an optimised cut list via OBJ export. A step-by-step guide for woodworking project planning. Autodesk has dropped the number, so what used to be Fusion 360 is now just **Fusion**. Most people still call it Fusion 360, and this page uses both. Autodesk **Fusion 360** already holds every dimension in your design. Getting those dimensions back out as **cut lists** you can take to the saw is the slow part, because it usually means reading numbers off the screen and typing them into a spreadsheet one at a time. There is a shorter route. Export the model as **STEP** or **OBJ**, import that file into **Cutlist Evolution**, and the parts list is built from the geometry itself. Four steps, and nothing gets retyped. --- ## Step 1: Designing Your Project in Fusion 360 Model the project the way you normally would. Fusion 360's **3D modeling capabilities** cover bespoke furniture, custom cabinetry and joinery at whatever precision you work to, and none of what follows asks you to design differently. Rectangular components still give the cleanest handover, because a panel defined by length, width and thickness maps straight onto a board. But shaped parts are no longer a dead end. The import classes every part as **Rectangular**, **Irregular** or **Not a panel**, and draws each outline for you. In nesting mode an irregular part is imported as its true shape and cut that way on a CNC. In rectangular cutting it is squared off to its tightest enclosing rectangle, with the cost of doing so stated on the row as a percentage of area, so you can decide part by part rather than in advance. --- ## Step 2: Exporting Your Model With the design finished and every component in place, export it. Fusion 360 writes several formats and Cutlist Evolution reads most of them, but two are worth knowing about. **STEP is the one to reach for.** A STEP file states its own units, so the sizes arrive exact and the import sets the unit for you. **OBJ also works**, and keeps the geometric detail of the solids intact, but it carries no unit at all. You set the unit yourself on import, and getting it wrong is silent rather than obvious, because every part stays correct relative to every other. A whole cabinet can arrive in tenths of a millimetre looking perfectly consistent. The import guards against this by showing the size of the whole model in the unit you are reading it as, and by offering to re-read the file when the model turns out to be barely wider than your saw blade. To export your model: 1. Navigate to **File > Export**. 2. From the "Type" dropdown menu, select **STEP Files (*.step)**, or **OBJ Files (*.obj)**. 3. Choose a location to save your file and click **Export**. Before you run the export, check that every component you want on the cut list is visible, and selected if you are prompted to select. Anything hidden at that moment will not be in the file. --- ## Step 3: Importing into Cutlist Evolution **Cutlist Evolution** is purpose-built to read 3D model data and produce a cut list from it. Drop the file you just exported into the [3D model cutlist generator](/app/import-3d) and it interprets the solids, extracts each part's dimensions, counts repeats into quantities and organizes the result into something you can buy material against and cut from. The generator is a page of its own rather than a panel in the corner of the app, which matters on a real model. You get the parts table beside a 3D preview, a **Checks** panel listing anything worth a second look before you cut, and a project name that titles the bill of materials you hand to a supplier, so it is not called `cabinet_v3_final`. This is the step that removes the typing. Transcribing dimensions from a model is where most cut list errors start, and it is usually the slowest part of planning a job. A job is rarely one export. Doors come from one file and carcasses from another, so several files dropped together are read as one model, with one merged parts list, and any part the file did not name takes its file's name instead. For a detailed guide on the import process, see [importing a model](/guide/3d-model-cutlist/). --- ## Step 4: Refining and Optimizing Your Cut List What arrives is a starting point rather than a finished list. A model file describes shape. It does not know that a part is oak rather than MDF, or that its grain should run along the length, which is what this step is for. Assign a material to each component so that plywood, solid wood and MDF are counted separately and the take-off is accurate. Set grain direction where it matters, for appearance across a run of doors or for strength. Edit dimensions, add parts the model does not contain and drop parts you are not cutting, until the list matches both the job and what your workshop can handle. Then let the optimizer nest the parts onto sheets, which is where the material saving comes from. --- ## What the Model Route Saves The route is short and it asks little of you. Exporting is three clicks in a menu, so you do not need to be fluent in the more involved corners of Fusion 360 to get a usable cut list out of a model. Accuracy is the larger gain. The file carries the precision of the model with it, so the cut list is as exact as the design is. Automating the extraction of dimensions and quantities takes manual data entry out of the process, along with the transcription errors and the wasted material that come with it. The last part is the layout. Cutlist Evolution nests the parts onto your stock sheets to keep offcut waste down, so the material bill for the job falls. Design and fabrication run as one sequence rather than two, with the export as the handover between them. --- Before you commit a whole project to this route, run one component through it. Model a single carcass, export it, import it, and check that the parts come back with the dimensions you expect. Once you trust that, designing in rectangular components from the outset costs you nothing and saves breaking the geometry down afterwards. A YouTube video explaining the Fusion 360 import for Cutlist Evolution --- ## Related Articles - [Turn a 3D model into a cut list](/3d-model-cut-list) - [Creating cut lists with SketchUp](/articles/sketchup-cutlist) - [Creating Cut Lists with Shapr3D](/articles/shapr3d-cutlist) - [Cut List Optimization for Cabinet Builders](/articles/benefits-cabinet-builders) --- # Creating a cut list from Shapr3D URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/shapr3d-cutlist > Turn a Shapr3D model into an optimised cut list with a STEP or OBJ export. A step-by-step guide for woodworking project planning. Shapr3D has become the CAD tool of choice for a lot of woodworkers and cabinet makers, mostly because it stays out of the way. Getting an optimized cut list out of a Shapr3D model is a short workflow: export as STEP, then open the file in Cutlist Evolution. ## Step 1: Designing in Shapr3D Start by building your project in Shapr3D's clean, touch-friendly interface. A custom kitchen, built-in shelving and a single piece of furniture all work the same way, and the modeling tools let you check every detail in 3D. Rectangular components give the cleanest result, so breaking the design down into individual boards, panels and shelves, exactly how you'd build it in the shop, is worth doing. Shaped parts are no longer a dead end though. Every part is classed as **Rectangular**, **Irregular** or **Not a panel**, with its outline drawn for you. In nesting mode an irregular part is cut as its true shape on a CNC. In rectangular cutting it is squared off to its tightest enclosing rectangle, with the waste that costs stated on the row, so you can decide part by part. ## Step 2: Exporting Your Model Once your design is complete, exporting takes seconds. Navigate to Shapr3D's export menu, choose a format, and save. **STEP is the one to reach for.** A STEP file declares its own units, so the sizes arrive exact and the import sets the unit for you. Shapr3D also exports **STL**, which Cutlist Evolution reads too. **OBJ works as well**, and preserves the dimensional data while keeping file sizes manageable, but it carries no unit at all. You set the unit yourself on import, and getting it wrong is silent rather than obvious, because every part stays correct relative to every other. A whole cabinet can arrive a thousand times too small looking perfectly consistent. The import guards against this by showing the size of the whole model in the unit you are reading it as, and by offering to re-read the file when the model turns out to be barely wider than your saw blade. Double-check that every component is in the selection before you export. Exporting everything at once is easier than tracking down the missing pieces afterwards. ## Step 3: Importing into Cutlist Evolution Drop the file into the [3D model cutlist generator](/app/import-3d) and Cutlist Evolution recognizes each component's dimensions. The 3D model becomes a structured cut list with part names, quantities, dimensions and grain direction indicators. The generator is a page of its own rather than a panel in the corner of the app. You get the parts table beside a 3D preview, a **Checks** panel listing anything worth a second look before you cut, and a project name that titles the bill of materials you hand to a supplier. A job is rarely one export either. Doors from one file and carcasses from another can be dropped together and are read as one model, with one merged parts list. The import process handles the tedious work of measuring and documenting every piece, eliminating transcription errors and missed components. For detailed import instructions, see [importing a model](/guide/3d-model-cutlist/). ## Step 4: Refining Your Cut List Cutlist Evolution gives you full control over the imported data. Adjust material thickness, rename components for clarity, specify grain direction, or group parts by assembly. You can also define your available stock sizes and let the optimizer work out the cutting patterns, which is where the material saving comes from. ## Benefits of the Shapr3D to Cutlist Evolution Workflow What used to take hours of measuring now takes minutes. Design in 3D, export, import, optimize, done. Exporting straight from CAD also removes measurement error. The dimensions in the cut list match the design exactly, every time. What comes out the other end goes to the saw station as it is: cutting diagrams, material summaries and part labels. Optimized cutting patterns typically reduce material waste by 15-20% compared to a layout worked out by hand. The workflow suits any shop that already models in 3D. The measurements exist in the design. There is no reason to write them out a second time with a tape measure and a notepad. ## Related Articles - [Turn a 3D model into a cut list](/3d-model-cut-list) - [Creating cut lists with SketchUp](/articles/sketchup-cutlist) - [Import formats: every route into Cutlist Evolution](/import-formats) - [Creating cut lists with Autodesk Fusion 360](/articles/fusion-360-cutlist) - [Cut list optimization for cabinet builders](/articles/benefits-cabinet-builders) --- # OptiCutter benchmark URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/opticutter-benchmark > Explore a detailed benchmark between OptiCutter and Cutlist Evolution. Understand their features and performance in real-world and test projects. This is a benchmark of OptiCutter against Cutlist Evolution, run on a mix of real-world and test projects. We build Cutlist Evolution, which is a reason to read the numbers carefully rather than a reason to skip them. Each job below is published with its parts count, its stock, the yield and the sheet count, so you can compare it against what your current tool returns on work of the same shape. ## Features Both tools produce sheet layouts and cover the basics of doing so. The table lists the features where the two diverge. Every one of them is present in Cutlist Evolution and absent from OptiCutter, and they are the ones that start to matter as jobs get more complex.
Feature OptiCutter Cutlist Evolution
Multiple materials and thicknesses
Offcut management
Cut measurements
Cost estimates
Saw settings
First cut direction choice
Share projects via link
Live chat support
## Performance Both tools were given the same parts and the same stock on two projects, one a deliberately hard test and one a real job at production scale. They are: 1. One of our internal benchmarks: 39 shapes and a single stock item. 2. A sizeable real-world project, two stock dimensions, 2,786 parts, unlimited stock. A third section follows the two head-to-head tests. It measures the same engine against a fixed lower bound across eleven production jobs, which answers a question a two-job comparison cannot: whether the margin above is a pair of lucky results or how the optimizer behaves in general. ### 1. 39 shapes on a single stock item This is one of our internal tests: 39 shapes that have to fit onto a single stock item. It is a real challenge for most optimizers. OptiCutter fails to fit all the parts, so finishing the project means ordering a second sheet and doubling the material cost.
Tool Yield Sheets needed Material area
OptiCutter 49.1% 2 11.1 sq m
Cutlist Evolution 98.2% 1 5.6 sq m
Additional efficiency 49.1% 1 fewer stock 5.5 sq m less material
The yield column says the same thing from the other side. At 49.1%, more than half the material OptiCutter asks you to buy leaves the shop as offcut. Cutlist Evolution fits the job on one sheet at 98.2%. ### 2. Two stock dimensions and many parts for a construction project A user came to us needing an estimate and a bill of materials for a large construction project. It ran to 2,786 parts, with two stock dimensions available. The larger of the two was a special order and the more expensive material, so the brief was to reduce how much of it the job required. The results are below.
Tool Yield Sheets needed Material area
OptiCutter 78% 1,176 42,080 sq ft
Cutlist Evolution 85% 1,125 38,664 sq ft
Additional efficiency 7% 51 fewer stock 3,416 sq ft less material
That is 51 fewer stock items ordered, worth thousands of dollars on a special-order material. A project this size needs a custom plan, but on a job carrying that many materials the software usually pays for itself the first time it runs. ### 3. Eleven production jobs against the theoretical limit The two tests above are head-to-head. This one is not, and it is worth being plain about that: **OptiCutter was not part of this study.** It measures Cutlist Evolution's optimizer against the industrial packing tools Magi-Cut and Ardis, and against something more useful than either. Every job was also scored against the **fewest stock it could physically need**, computed as a Dual First-Fit lower bound from the part areas. That number is not a target set by a vendor. It is a floor no optimizer can beat, which makes it the one benchmark figure nobody can tune towards. Eleven of the hardest-packing jobs in our library, 1,136 parts in all, run with identical parts, stock, kerf and trim:
Tool Total stock used Mean yield Jobs at the limit
Magi-Cut 103 82.2% —
Ardis 99 85.4% —
Cutlist Evolution 94 90.3% 11 of 11
Fewest physically possible 94 — —
The last two rows are the result. Across all eleven jobs Cutlist Evolution used 94 stock items, and 94 is the fewest the parts could occupy. On every job in the study it matched that floor, so on this set nothing could have done better. Each figure was re-run three times to confirm it. Against the rivals that is 9 stock saved on Magi-Cut and 5 on Ardis over the same work, or **8.7% and 5.1% less material** respectively. Job sizes ran from 64 to 170 parts on 2800 x 2050 mm stock, so this is production work rather than a contrived test. The reason it belongs on this page is what it says about the two head-to-head results above. An optimizer that lands on the physical floor eleven times out of eleven is not winning those comparisons by luck on the day. The full study, with every job's layout viewable side by side, is at [smartcut.dev/benchmarks](https://smartcut.dev/benchmarks). ## Final words Both are competent tools. On the two projects here Cutlist Evolution used less material, and the margin widened with the size and difficulty of the job: one sheet against two on the packing test, 1,125 sheets against 1,176 on the construction job. The eleven-job study points the same way from a different angle, landing on the fewest stock physically possible every time. The features in the table above, offcut management, cost estimates and the advanced settings among them, are what carry that difference into complex or large-scale work. If you want a fuller run-through of either benchmark, or the same comparison run on your own parts list, get in touch. Which optimizer you choose is worth settling on measurements rather than on feature lists, including ours. ## Related articles - [OptiCutter alternative: the switching guide](/alternatives/opticutter) - [Comparison with CutList Optimizer](/articles/comparison-cutlist-optimizer) - [How cutlist optimizer works](/articles/how-cutlist-optimizer-works) --- # Comparison with cutlistoptimizer.com URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/comparison-cutlist-optimizer > Compare CutList Optimizer and Cutlist Evolution. Understand their features, efficiency, and functionality to choose the best cutting optimization software. CutList Optimizer is a simple app and website that attempts to create cutting diagrams and reduce waste. It uses a simple mathematical model, and its efficiency and functionality are limited. The table compares the features of two software programs, CutList Optimizer (CLO) and Cutlist Evolution. While both programs share several features, Cutlist Evolution offers additional functionality.
Feature CutList Optimizer Cutlist Evolution
Lock part orientation
Import from spreadsheet
Edge banding
Material thicknesses
Save projects
Sheet materials
Linear materials
Roll settings
Print labels
Share project via link
Stock trim cuts
Export to DXF, CSV, SVG & PTX
Settings for CNC, table, and beam saws
Ability to move parts
Visualise all offcuts
Stock inventory management
The additional features of Cutlist Evolution include the following: **Linear materials**: Cutlist Evolution allows users to work with linear materials, expanding the range of materials that can be optimized for cutting plans. **Roll settings**: Users can specify roll settings in Cutlist Evolution, which is particularly useful when dealing with roll materials such as fabrics or wallpapers. **Print labels**: Cutlist Evolution provides the capability to print labels, making it easier to identify and track different parts during the cutting process. **Share project via link**: With Cutlist Evolution, users can share their projects by generating a link, facilitating collaboration and communication with others involved. **Stock trim cuts**: The program allows users to make stock trim cuts, reducing waste and maximizing material utilization. **Export to various file formats**: Cutlist Evolution supports exporting projects to file formats such as DXF, CSV, SVG, and PTX, providing flexibility and compatibility with other software and equipment. **Settings for CNC, table, and beam saws**: Cutlist Evolution offers specific settings tailored to different cutting equipment, enabling users to optimize their cutting plans according to the requirements of their machinery. **Ability to move parts**: Users can quickly move parts within Cutlist Evolution, allowing for adjustments and fine-tuning of the cutting layout. **Visualise all offcuts**: The program provides a visualisation of all offcuts, helping users to identify and utilise remaining materials effectively. **Stock inventory management**: Cutlist Evolution offers features for managing stock inventory, enabling users to keep track of available materials and plan future projects accordingly. ## Related articles - [OptiCutter benchmark](/articles/opticutter-benchmark) --- # Approaches to the bin packing problem URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/bin-packing-problem > How the 2D bin packing problem is solved in practice: heuristics, exact methods and metaheuristics, and when each one is worth the compute. The two-dimensional bin packing problem asks a simple question with no simple answer. Given a set of rectangular parts and a supply of larger rectangular sheets, what is the smallest number of sheets that will hold every part? Anyone who has cut sheet material for a living has solved a version of it by hand. The same problem turns up in glass cutting, sheet metal fabrication, textiles, warehousing and container loading. It is one of the oldest problems in operations research and it remains an active area of study, because the obvious approaches stop working at exactly the scale where the problem starts to matter commercially. This article covers the main families of solution, what each one is good for, and where each one runs out of road. --- ## What the problem actually specifies The parts are rectangles. The sheets are larger rectangles. Every part must end up inside exactly one sheet, no two parts may overlap, and parts sit square to the sheet edges rather than at arbitrary angles. Rotation by ninety degrees is usually allowed, though not always. Grained material and printed stock have a direction, and a part rotated across the grain is scrap. The objective is to use as few sheets as possible. In practice that is rarely the only objective. A layout that saves half a sheet but leaves twenty unusable slivers is worse than one that uses the same material and leaves a single rectangular offcut you can put back on the rack. Cut count matters too, because every cut is time on a saw and a chance to introduce error. The problem is NP-hard. In plain terms, no known method finds the guaranteed best answer in reasonable time once the number of parts grows, and the time required climbs faster than the problem does. Twenty parts is tractable. Two hundred is not, at least not exactly. Everything below is a response to that fact. --- ## Heuristics: fast, good enough, and the basis of almost everything A heuristic follows a sensible rule rather than searching for the best answer. It gives up any guarantee of optimality in exchange for speed, which for most real work is the right trade. ### First-Fit and Best-Fit The simplest approach takes the parts one at a time and places each into the first sheet it fits. That is First-Fit. Best-Fit instead places each part into the sheet where it leaves the least space behind, which tends to keep sheets tightly packed rather than leaving several half-used. Both improve substantially if the parts are sorted largest first before placement, giving First-Fit Decreasing and Best-Fit Decreasing. The reasoning is intuitive. Large parts are hard to place late, when only awkward gaps remain, whereas small parts will fit almost anywhere. Placing the difficult items while options are still open is worth more than any amount of cleverness later. These methods run in milliseconds and produce respectable layouts. Their weakness is that every decision is local. A choice that looks best for one part can leave the sheet in a shape that costs two parts later, and the algorithm has no mechanism to notice or reconsider. ### Guillotine cuts Guillotine packing adds a constraint that comes from the machine rather than the mathematics. A guillotine cut runs edge to edge across the material, splitting it into two pieces. Cut those pieces the same way, recursively, and you have a guillotine layout. This matters because most panel saws and beam saws physically cannot cut any other way. The blade traverses the whole width. A layout containing an L-shaped region that a real saw cannot produce is not a solution, however efficient it looks on screen. The constraint costs material. A guillotine layout will generally use slightly more sheet than an unconstrained one. It buys a cutting sequence that a machine can actually execute, which is a requirement rather than a compromise. ### Shelf algorithms Shelf methods divide the sheet into horizontal bands. Parts are placed left to right along a shelf until the next one will not fit, at which point a new shelf opens above. The approach suits parts of similar height, which is why it appears in linear and roll cutting more often than in general panel work. Where heights vary widely it wastes the space above every short part on a tall shelf. It is simple, predictable and fast, and it produces layouts that are trivially guillotine-safe. --- ## Exact methods: the right answer, at a price Exact methods search until they can prove no better layout exists. When they finish, the answer is not merely good. It is optimal, and you know it. ### Integer linear programming The problem can be written as a set of linear constraints over integer variables, with binary decisions for whether a given part occupies a given position on a given sheet, and constraints forbidding overlap. Commercial and open-source solvers then apply decades of accumulated technique to it. The formulation is exact and the tooling is mature. The difficulty is that the number of variables grows quickly with the number of parts and the resolution of the coordinate grid, and solve time grows faster still. Integer programming is genuinely useful on small instances, and as a benchmark to measure heuristics against, which is arguably its more valuable role. It is rarely the engine behind a production optimiser handling hundreds of parts. ### Dynamic programming Dynamic programming breaks the problem into subproblems, solves each once and reuses the results. For packing, that usually means computing the best way to fill a region of given dimensions and consulting that answer whenever the same region reappears. It works well when the material and part sizes come from a small set, which happens more often than you might expect. A workshop cutting standard sheets into a repeating catalogue of components sees the same subproblems constantly. It degrades when dimensions are arbitrary, because the table of stored states grows past anything useful. --- ## Metaheuristics: searching the space of solutions Metaheuristics sit above the problem. Rather than constructing a layout directly, they explore the space of possible layouts, using a heuristic to evaluate each one and a strategy to decide where to look next. They offer no guarantee, but on hard instances they routinely beat anything constructive. ### Genetic algorithms A genetic algorithm keeps a population of candidate solutions, scores each, and builds the next generation by combining the better ones and introducing random variation. Over many generations the population tends toward stronger layouts. The encoding matters more than the biology. Represent a layout as an ordering of parts fed to a placement heuristic, and crossover produces valid offspring naturally. Represent it as raw coordinates and most offspring are invalid, so most of the computation is spent repairing them. ### Simulated annealing Simulated annealing starts from one solution and repeatedly makes small changes, accepting improvements always and accepting worse solutions sometimes. The probability of accepting a worse solution falls as the search proceeds. That willingness to move backwards early is the entire point. A search that only ever improves gets stuck at the first local optimum it reaches, and in packing those are everywhere. Annealing climbs out of them while it is still hot, then settles as it cools. ### Particle swarm optimization Particle swarm methods maintain a population that moves through the solution space, each member steering partly toward its own best result and partly toward the best the group has found. It converges quickly and parallelises well, though on packing problems it tends to need a well-chosen encoding to compete with annealing or an evolutionary approach. --- ## Hybrid approaches In the published literature, combinations consistently outperform any single method used alone. There is no single recommended recipe. Broadly they fall into two families. In one, a fast constructive method produces a starting layout that a slower search then refines. In the other, an exact method is applied to small or critical subproblems while an approximate method handles the rest. The appeal is the trade-off. A hybrid can approach the quality of an exact method at a fraction of the cost, which is what makes these approaches practical outside academic work. Where the handover happens, and how each component is tuned, is where most of the engineering effort goes, and it varies considerably with the material, the part mix and the time available. --- ## What this looks like in practice Software that optimizes cutting layouts hides all of the above behind an interface, which is the correct place for it. The person cutting the material should not have to choose a metaheuristic. Tools such as [Cutlist Evolution](https://cutlistevo.com) and [SmartCut](https://smartcut.dev) take a parts list and a stock list and return a layout, usually in a second or two. What that saves is straightforward. Less material goes in the skip, planning that took half an hour takes seconds, and the cutting instructions that come out are unambiguous enough to hand to someone else or send to a machine. Two things are worth checking in any optimizer you evaluate. Does it respect the constraints your saw actually has, particularly guillotine cutting and grain direction? And does it publish results against real jobs rather than describing its approach in general terms? Cutting optimization is unusually easy to make claims about and unusually hard to verify, so measurements against a stated set of jobs are worth more than a description of the algorithm. --- ## Final words The two-dimensional bin packing problem sits where mathematics meets a saw. The theory is genuinely hard, the practical constraints are unforgiving, and the methods that work in production are usually combinations rather than any single technique from a textbook. For anyone specifying or buying this kind of software, the useful question is not which algorithm a tool uses. It is whether the layouts it produces can be cut on the machine you own, and whether the vendor can show you what happened when it was tried on jobs like yours. --- ## Related Articles - [The stock cutting problem](/articles/stock-cutting-problem) - [Cut list optimization for cabinet builders](/articles/benefits-cabinet-builders) - [How a cutlist optimizer works](/articles/how-cutlist-optimizer-works) - [The best nesting software](/articles/best-nesting-software), Deepnest, SVGnest, Autodesk and Nest&Cut compared --- # The stock cutting problem URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/stock-cutting-problem > Explore the stock cutting problem, focusing on optimizing material usage & minimizing waste with advanced computational software. Every shop that cuts sheet or board material runs into the same question. How many parts can you get out of the stock you have, and how little of it can you throw away? A cabinet shop, a metal fabricator and a textile cutter all meet it in more or less the same form. It has been worth money for long enough that both the mathematics and the software have had decades of attention. ## Understanding the Stock Cutting Problem The problem is easy to state. You have stock of a known size and a list of parts you need out of it. Find the cutting patterns that use the fewest sheets, or the least length, and leave the smallest remnant behind. Stating it is the easy part. The number of possible arrangements climbs steeply with every extra part, every additional size and every constraint the shop imposes. This is the same territory as the two-dimensional [bin packing problem](/articles/bin-packing-problem), and it is hard for the same reason. Short of trying the arrangements, nothing proves which one is best. ### Where It Gets Difficult Three things make it awkward in practice. A single job may call for dozens of different dimensions, each with its own quantity. The material constrains the layout as well, through wood grain direction, stress patterns in metal, or weave orientation in fabric. And the tightest layout on paper is not always the one you want, once blade kerf, cutting time and the limits of the machine are taken into account. ## Importance in Industry In industries where material is 40-60% of total cost, a 5% improvement in yield is worth having on its own terms. The waste is the second effect. Less material bought is less consumed and less sent to landfill, which customers increasingly ask about. The third is time. A good set of patterns means fewer machine hours and less handling, because parts come off the saw in an order that suits whatever happens next. ## Methodological Approaches The methods fall into three groups. Production software usually contains more than one of them. ### 1. Heuristic Methods A heuristic follows a sensible rule instead of searching. 'First Fit' puts each piece in the first space where it fits. 'Best Fit' looks for the tightest placement available. Neither guarantees anything, both run quickly, and in practice they often land within 5-10% of the theoretical optimum. That is close enough for a lot of real work. ### 2. Mathematical and Exact Methods Integer Linear Programming (ILP) writes the cutting problem as a system of equations and constraints and hands it to a solver. When an answer arrives it is provably optimal. The difficulty is when. Solve time grows fast with the size of the instance, and a plan with 50 different pieces might take hours or even days to solve exactly. ### 3. Metaheuristic Algorithms Metaheuristics search the space of possible layouts rather than building one directly. Genetic algorithms breed better cutting patterns out of a population of candidates. Simulated annealing borrows from metallurgy, accepting a worse layout early in the run so the search can climb back out of a dead end. They offer no guarantee either, but on a hard job they typically find something close to optimal in minutes rather than hours. ## Software Solutions in Practice [Cutlist Evolution](https://cutlistevo.com) runs in the browser. It takes a parts list and a stock list, across several materials and thicknesses at once, and returns the layout and the cutting instructions. [SmartCut](https://smartcut.dev) is the same optimisation engine behind a cloud API, for manufacturers and software vendors building cutting optimisation into their own systems. It is benchmarked in the open, on thousands of real production jobs, against a provable optimality bound. ## Final Thoughts Two things have changed here, and neither of them is the mathematics. Compute got cheap enough to search the space properly. The software got usable enough that the person cutting the material never needs to know which method produced the layout. The problem itself is as hard as it ever was. That is the argument for handing it to something that does nothing else. ## Related Articles - [Nesting from AutoCAD](/articles/autocad-nesting) - [The bin packing problem](/articles/bin-packing-problem) - [How cutlist optimizer works](/articles/how-cutlist-optimizer-works) - [Cut list optimization for cabinet builders](/articles/benefits-cabinet-builders) --- # How a Cutlist Optimizer works URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/how-cutlist-optimizer-works > Explore cutlist optimizer software, a key tool for enhancing material efficiency and reducing waste in woodworking, manufacturing, and construction. A cutlist optimizer answers one question. Given the parts you need and the stock you have, where should the cuts go? A cabinet shop, a metal fabricator and a site contractor are all asking it, and answering it by hand costs either material or time, usually both. ## Core Functionality of Cutlist Optimizers Give the software a parts list and a stock list and four things happen, in order. 1. You enter the dimensions of the parts you need and the stock you have available, whether that is sheet sizes, board lengths or roll widths. 2. The software works through thousands or even millions of possible arrangements, comparing each layout to find the one that wastes the least material. 3. It produces a cutting diagram showing where every part sits on the raw material. For wood that includes grain direction. Other materials bring constraints of their own. 4. It gives the order of the cuts as well as their positions. That order is what keeps the cuts accurate, and what stops you reaching a point where the remaining cuts cannot safely be made. The search behind step two is a version of two-dimensional bin packing, and the methods used to do it are covered in [approaches to the bin packing problem](/articles/bin-packing-problem). ## Advanced Features and Considerations Past plain rectangular nesting, most current optimizers handle a few things that come from the workshop rather than from the mathematics. Material accounts for much of it. Wood optimizers respect grain direction, for strength and for appearance. Metal optimizers account for heat-affected zones. Fabric optimizers deal with pattern matching. You can usually mark unusable areas on a sheet as well, knots or scratches or damaged sections, and the layout will work around them. The rest comes from the machine. Blade thickness, minimum spacing between parts and the limits of the saw itself all feed into the layout, because a plan that ignores them is not cuttable. Offcuts from earlier jobs can generally be added back to the stock list and used in new plans. ## Environmental and Cost Impact Most shops report 10-15% material savings after moving to optimization software, and some report 20% or more. Where material is half the cost of a project, that comes straight off the job. The waste side is the same figure read differently: fewer trees felled, less metal mined and less going to landfill, which is something customers now ask about. ## Output and Analytics The output is more than the cutting diagram. Most tools also give you: - Detailed part lists with dimensions and quantities - Material usage summaries showing exactly what you'll need to buy - Waste percentages to track efficiency over time - Cut sequences optimized for your specific equipment - Labels and barcodes for part tracking through production Some will also compare material options for you, so you can see whether a premium sheet with less waste works out cheaper than a budget one with more scrap. ## Industry Applications The same software gets used quite differently from one trade to the next. Cabinet makers and furniture builders are mostly protecting expensive hardwood. They need grain direction respected and solid stock kept in step with sheet goods. Metal fabricators nest for plasma, laser and waterjet, where the cut itself takes time and the layout decides how much. Plastics work turns on the price of engineered material more than on the cutting. On site, contractors run everything from drywall layouts to structural steel through an optimizer, and the saving there is in skip hire as much as in material. ## Future Trends and Developments Computing power and better algorithms keep moving this along. Machine learning is being used to read a shop's cutting history and set sensible defaults from it. Cloud systems make the same optimization available across several locations at once. Integration with design software means the layout can be produced as soon as a design is signed off, which removes the export step rather than making it quicker. Nesting software began as a way to avoid drawing layouts on paper. It sits closer to production planning now, because the cutting diagram, the material order and the labels all come out of the same file. For most shops that is worth more than the percentage on the waste report. ## Common Questions ### Is cut list optimization worth it? For anyone cutting sheet or linear stock regularly, yes, and the arithmetic is short. Most shops report 10-15% material savings after moving to optimization software, and material is often half the cost of a job. A free optimizer that saves one sheet on a single project has already paid for the ten minutes it took to learn. The cases where it is not worth it are genuinely small ones: a handful of cuts on one board can be laid out by eye. ### What is a cut optimizer used for? Three things: deciding how many boards or sheets to buy, laying out each cut so waste ends up as usable offcuts rather than slivers, and producing the cutting diagram the person at the saw works from. Shops also use the same output for quoting, since the material count is the largest number in the price. ### What software do woodworkers use for cut lists? A cut list optimizer. [Cutlist Evolution](https://cutlistevo.com) is free to use in the browser for sheet and linear stock, and imports parts from spreadsheets or directly from [Fusion 360](/articles/fusion-360-cutlist) and [Shapr3D](/articles/shapr3d-cutlist) models. Which tool fits which shop is covered in the [2026 comparison](/articles/best-cutlist-optimizer-2026). ## Related Articles - [Creating cut lists with Fusion 360](/articles/fusion-360-cutlist) - [Cut list optimization for cabinet builders](/articles/benefits-cabinet-builders) --- # Cutlist optimization for cabinet makers URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/benefits-cabinet-builders > Discover how cutlist optimizer software enhances material efficiency and reduces waste for cabinet builders. Cabinet making is a sheet material business. Almost every part of a carcass starts as a rectangle taken off a full sheet, and the difference between a job that made money and one that did not is often just how many sheets it took. Cut list optimization software does that arithmetic. Give it the parts a job needs and the sheets you hold, and it returns a cutting plan: which part comes off which sheet, in what order, with the saw kerf allowed for. The gains show up in material, in time, and in how many parts come back off the bench because they did not fit. --- ## 1. Material Savings and Unmatched Cost Efficiency Laying parts out by hand, most people work down the sheet in rows. It is easy to think about and it leaves the far corner of every sheet unused. Software treats the same job as a packing problem and fits parts into the gaps a row-by-row layout throws away. The formal version of this is the [two-dimensional bin packing problem](/articles/bin-packing-problem), and it is harder than it looks, which is why solving it by eye tends to cost a sheet or two on a kitchen. Two things come out of a better layout. Fewer sheets bought for the same job, which is the obvious one. Less obviously, what is left over is left in usable shapes. A full-width strip off the end of a sheet goes back on the rack and gets used on the next job. The same area spread across a dozen narrow slivers is scrap you pay to have taken away. Faced and veneered board narrows the choices further, because a part rotated across the grain is scrap even though it fits, and the layout has to know that. The saving on any one job is modest. Over a year of jobs, a few percent off the board bill is real money for a busy shop. --- ## 2. Enhanced Productivity and Superior Time Management Planning a kitchen by hand is an hour with a calculator, a pencil and a sheet of squared paper. Then the customer moves a wall unit 100mm and it is another hour. Software returns a plan in seconds and redoes it for nothing. That time comes back twice. Once in the shop, where the person who is good at cutting spends the morning cutting instead of doing arithmetic. Once at the quoting stage, where a real sheet count means a price can go out while the customer is still deciding. A quote that arrives that afternoon is worth more than a sharper one that arrives the following week. In a shop running several jobs at once the effect compounds, because parts from different orders can be nested on the same sheets and cut in one pass rather than one job at a time. --- ## 3. Improved Accuracy and Consistent Quality Cabinet parts have to fit each other. A gable 2mm short shows up as a gap at the top of a door, and a run of drawer fronts carrying a millimeter of drift looks wrong from across the room even to someone who could not say why. Most of that error is arithmetic rather than sawing. Someone works a part size out wrong, or writes 596 where they meant 569, or forgets to take two divider thicknesses off a shelf. A cut list generated from the design carries the sizes straight through to the saw without anyone retyping them. The saving is in what you do not have to do twice. A miscut part on faced board costs the material, the time to cut it again, and the delay while a replacement is made. It usually surfaces at assembly, when the rest of the job is already waiting on it. --- ## 4. Reduced Labor Costs and Optimized Workforce Utilization Planning is not billable. It has to happen, no customer will pay a line for it, and in most shops it lands on whoever is most experienced, which is the most expensive way to get it done. Automating the layout takes that work off the bench. In a one-person shop it is an evening back. In a larger one it is hours that were booked to planning going to cutting, assembly and finishing instead, and fewer of those hours needed as volume grows. The point is not fewer people. It is that the people you have spend their time on the work that needs their judgement: the joinery, the fitting, the finish, the check before a job goes on the van. Arranging rectangles on a sheet needs no judgement at all. It needs a computer. --- ## 5. Flexibility on Custom Orders Cabinet work is rarely repeat work. A kitchen is built to a room, and the room has a chimney breast in it. Sizes change during a job about as often as they are settled at the start of one. Changing a hand-drawn layout means drawing it again. Changing it in software means editing a number and running it a second time. That difference is what makes awkward requests economic rather than something to price defensively. A customer who wants the base units 40mm shallower to clear a radiator becomes an edit, and a batch of drawers in a different material becomes a line on the parts list. Being able to say yes to that quickly is worth something in a market where nearly every enquiry is a one-off. --- ## 6. Sustainability and Environmental Responsibility Waste in a cabinet shop is visible. It is the skip outside the door, and it costs money twice: once when you buy the board and again when you pay to have the offcuts taken away. Cutting the same work from fewer sheets is the whole of the improvement. Less board bought, fewer deliveries, a smaller skip. It is one of the few environmental gains that pays for itself instead of costing something, which is why it tends to stick. If you tender for commercial or public work you may be asked what you do about waste. Recorded sheet yields, job by job, are a straight answer to that question. --- ## 7. Records and Repeat Work Most of these tools keep what they have done: the parts lists, the layouts, the materials used and the yield each job achieved. That turns into two useful things. Repeat orders get re-run rather than rebuilt, which matters to anyone making the same units for a developer or a letting agent. And quoting stops being guesswork, because you can look at what a similar job actually took rather than what you thought it would take. Over enough jobs the yields also show where material goes. A board that consistently comes out at a poorer yield than the rest is worth checking against the sheet size you buy it in. --- ## 8. Significant Competitive Advantage in the Market Three things win cabinet work: the price, the quality and the date. Optimization touches all three, which is unusual. Material cost comes down, parts fit because the sizes were calculated rather than measured twice, and the job moves through the shop faster because the cutting was planned before anyone switched a machine on. None of that is visible to the customer, and that is fine. What they see is a price that holds, units that fit the room, and delivery on the day you said. That is most of a reputation. --- ## 9. Scalability for Sustained Business Growth The way a shop works at ten jobs a month is not the way it works at fifty. Hand planning is usually the first thing to break, because the time it takes scales with the number of jobs and no amount of practice makes it much faster. Software does not care. The same plan comes back for five sheets or fifty, for one material or eight, for a job of twenty parts or four hundred. Taking on more work becomes a question of saw time and bench space rather than of who has an evening free to lay the sheets out. That is worth thinking about when choosing a tool. What suits a two-person workshop and what suits a production line are not always the same thing, and changing horses halfway through a growth spurt costs more than picking properly at the start. --- ## Conclusion: Optimizing for the Future Cut list optimization has stopped being a specialist purchase. Enough of the trade runs on it now that a shop still laying sheets out by hand is giving away material, time and turnaround to the shops that are not. If you are choosing between tools, the useful questions are practical rather than technical. Does it cut the way your saw cuts, which for most panel saws means guillotine cuts running edge to edge? Can you set your own kerf? Does it respect grain direction on faced and veneered board? Will it keep track of the offcuts you put back on the rack and use them on the next job? A tool that gets those four right will save you more than one that produces a slightly tighter layout and ignores them. --- ## Related Articles - [Starting a cut-to-size business](/articles/cut-to-size-business) --- # Setting up a cut-to-size business URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/cut-to-size-business > Starting a Cut-to-Size Business: A Complete Guide covering business fundamentals, market analysis, and featuring a tailored website solution for success. A cut-to-size business takes stock material and hands it back at the sizes the customer asked for. The materials vary more than people expect. Sheet timber, MDF and faced board, acrylic and polycarbonate, aluminum and mild steel, composite panel, and rolled goods sold by the linear meter. So does the customer list. A shopfitter ordering forty carcass panels and a homeowner ordering one shelf are both real orders, and they want very different things from you. Two decisions shape the business more than the rest. The first is what you cut with, because that sets which materials you can take on and how fast you turn work around. The second is how orders reach you. A shop that takes sizes down over the phone spends its mornings writing quotes. A shop that takes them through its own website spends its mornings cutting. --- ## Understanding the Market and Client Needs Before committing to a machine or a unit, find out what people near you are actually buying. Kitchen and bedroom work runs on 18mm faced chipboard and MDF. Shopfitting brings in acrylic, thicker board and more awkward shapes. Sign makers want small quantities cut accurately and want them quickly. Local timber merchants and plastics stockists are worth talking to, because they know what they get asked for and what they turn away. Trade and retail are different businesses wearing the same overalls. Trade customers order regularly, in quantity, and expect an account, a price list and the day you promised, because a joiner with no gables cannot fit a kitchen. Retail customers order once, ask more questions, pay up front and are usually more relaxed about the date. You can serve both. You cannot serve both on the same pricing and the same lead time. Then order something from the two or three firms already doing this near you. How long did the quote take, and did a person have to write it? Are they charging by the sheet, by the cut, by part area, or some combination of those? Were the parts square, were the edges clean, and did the packaging survive delivery? Gaps turn up quickly. Nobody cutting the thicker acrylic, everybody quoting five working days, no one willing to take a single-sheet retail order. Your plan should say which of those gaps you intend to fill. --- ## Choosing the Right Cutting Equipment Most cut-to-size work is done on a saw. A vertical panel saw stands against a wall, takes little floor space and lets one person break down a full sheet safely, which makes it the usual starting point. A horizontal beam saw cuts a stack of sheets to a program and is a different order of purchase: the machine, the floor space to load and unload it, the power supply, and someone who can run it. A table saw with a sled and a decent track saw will get a small operation going, but every cut is set up by hand and the throughput shows it. A CNC router earns its place when the parts stop being rectangles. It cuts shapes, drills the holes for hardware in the same operation, and nests parts across the sheet. It costs more to buy, more to tool, and it needs someone to program it. What it buys is work a saw cannot take at all, which is usually where the better margins sit. Laser and waterjet cutters are specialist rather than general. A laser suits thinner material and engraves as well as cuts, which fits acrylic, thin timber and fabric. A waterjet will cut almost anything, including thick metal, stone and glass, and leaves no heat-affected edge. Both are large investments. Buy one because you already have the work, not in the hope that the work turns up. Match the machine to the material you expect to sell most of, the volume you can realistically win, and the tolerance your customers will hold you to. Automated machinery costs more up front and pays it back through throughput, less waste, and the complicated jobs a manual shop has to turn down. --- ## Integrating Automation and Software Solutions The machine is half of it. Every order still has to become a cutting plan, and doing that by eye costs material on every job. Tools such as **Cutlist Evolution** take the parts a customer ordered and the sheets you hold, and return a layout: which part comes off which sheet, in what order, with the saw kerf allowed for. A good layout does two jobs at once. It fits the parts on fewer sheets, and it leaves what is left over in usable pieces. The second one matters more than it sounds. A full-width strip off the end of a sheet goes back on the rack and gets used next week. The same area spread across fifteen narrow slivers is scrap you pay somebody to take away. Everything downstream gets quicker as well. Quotes go out the same day because the sheet count is calculated rather than guessed. Material comes off the stock count as it is used, so you find out you are short of 18mm white before an order is booked rather than on the morning it is due. And the plan can go to the saw or the router directly instead of being copied onto a cut sheet by hand, which is where most transcription errors start. --- ## Establishing a Powerful Online Presence with SmartCut Most cut-to-size enquiries now start on a phone screen, often in the evening. If the only way to get a price out of you is to send an email and wait until Monday, those orders go somewhere else. The **SmartCut WordPress plugin** exists for that gap. It is an off-the-shelf plugin that turns a WordPress and WooCommerce site into a cut-to-size shop, so customers price and place their own orders. ### Easy Integration and Customization Setting it up is a plugin upload rather than a development project. You add your domain to your SmartCut account, install WooCommerce, and put the cut-to-size items into a product category the plugin watches. The admin menu generates template products, so you can see a working setup before building your own. Settings sit in a hierarchy. Global settings apply across the store and a product setting overrides them, so it pays to get the global values right first rather than editing every product later. Materials are ordinary WooCommerce products. A fixed sheet size is a simple product, and several thicknesses or several sheet sizes become variations. The plugin is documented as working best on the Storefront theme with few other plugins and no page builder, so a plainly built store gives less trouble than a heavy one. ### Efficient Online Ordering System The customer picks a material, types their sizes and quantities, and adds extras such as edge banding or a finish. Pricing follows whichever model matches how you sell: by the full sheet, by part area, by cut length, or a sheet price with cut length or part count added on top. Banding is priced by the meter, finishes by the square meter. A trade customer with a long parts list can import it from a CSV rather than typing rows one at a time. The quiet benefit is who does the typing. When the customer enters their own dimensions, the sizes on the order are the sizes they meant. Nobody has misheard 1220 as 1200 down a bad line, and if a job does turn out wrong there is a record of exactly what was asked for. ### Enhanced Customer Experience Prices update as the customer changes the numbers, so they can see what an extra shelf or a thicker board costs before they commit. Cut-to-size storefronts can also show how the parts sit on the sheet before the order is placed, which catches misunderstandings early. The site takes orders at eleven at night and on a Sunday, which is when a good deal of one-off work gets ordered. A site that prices a job properly also reads as a business that will cut it properly. ### Order Handling Orders arrive with the parts list attached rather than as a paragraph of text in an email. From there they go into production the way you already work, exported to your optimizer or sent to the machine, without anyone retyping a dimension. Orders also land in one place with a status against them, so you can see what is cut, what is waiting on board and what is ready to go out. That is what decides whether growth costs you another person in the office. Twice the orders through a form is twice the orders. Twice the orders over the phone is a second phone. After a few months the orders tell you things worth knowing: which materials and thicknesses actually sell, which sizes come up again and again, which weeks are busy. That is a better basis for a stock decision than anything you guessed at the start. --- ## Marketing and Growth Strategies Most of this work is found by search, and the searches are specific. People type the material and the thickness rather than the service: 18mm mdf cut to size, acrylic sheet cut to size, plywood cut to size near me. Pages that name the materials you stock, the thicknesses you hold and the sizes you can cut will pick that traffic up. A page about quality and service will not. If customers drive to you, local search does most of the work. Keep the Google Business Profile accurate, with real opening hours, the address people should navigate to, and photographs of the work rather than the front of the unit. Trade reviews are worth asking for. Writing about the work catches people who have not decided yet. How to allow for kerf, what thickness suits a run of shelves, which board takes a screw near an edge. Photographs do the same job on Instagram, and LinkedIn is where the shopfitters and contract joiners are. An email list of past trade customers is cheap to keep and worth a note whenever you add a material or a machine. The steadiest work comes from other trades. Cabinet makers who would rather not break down sheets, interior designers with a client and no workshop, contractors who need panels on site on a fixed date. Half a dozen of those relationships beat a busy month of one-off retail orders, and they get built at trade shows, merchant counters and local business groups rather than online. --- ## Final Words The equipment decision is the one you cannot easily undo. The ordering decision is the one that decides how your week is spent. A shop with a good saw and no way to take an order online fills its days with quotes. A shop with good ordering and the wrong machine wins work it cannot cut. Get both roughly right and what is left is ordinary business. Hold the materials people ask for, cut them square, and hit the day you promised. --- ## Related Articles - [Cut list optimization for cabinet builders](/articles/benefits-cabinet-builders) --- ## Solutions - [SmartCut WordPress plugin](https://smartcut.dev/) - [SmartCut demo e-commerce store](https://smartcut.dev/ecommerce/demo) --- # Cutlist optimization: desktop to cloud URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/cloud-based-optimization-whitepaper > Why cloud cutlist optimization beats legacy desktop software: faster quotes, no installs, and e-commerce integration that desktop tools cannot offer. ## Executive Summary Most cutlist optimization software still runs as a Windows desktop application, and that architecture, rather than the algorithm inside it, is now the limiting factor. A desktop tool cannot answer a quote request that arrives from a website. It cannot be updated across twenty machines at once. It cannot borrow more processing power for one difficult job. This paper sets out where the legacy model breaks down, what a cloud-native architecture changes, and how Cutlist Evolution (CLE) is built around speed, scale and integration. ## Introduction Cutlist optimization is the problem of cutting raw material into the pieces a job needs while wasting as little as possible. It appears in timber, metal fabrication, textiles and composites, anywhere stock arrives in standard sizes and leaves in custom ones. The mathematics is old and thoroughly studied. The software around it has not kept pace. Cloud computing, real-time quotation and e-commerce have changed how the businesses doing the cutting operate. Their optimization software has largely stayed where it was, isolated on a workstation, and the result is a bottleneck that reaches everything from customer response time to production planning. That gap between what these businesses need and what their tools do is what Cutlist Evolution was built to close. ## The Problem: Legacy Software in a Cloud-First World ### Architectural Limitations of Traditional Solutions Existing cutlist optimization software is predominantly Windows desktop software, designed for a business that worked differently. The limits are architectural rather than cosmetic, so no amount of interface work removes them. Installation is per machine. A business with three sites, or anyone working from home, has to install, license and update each copy by hand, and the versions drift apart until two people optimizing the same job get different answers. All computation happens on local hardware, so a large job ties up the workstation running it for as long as it takes. That puts a practical ceiling on the size of problem anyone bothers to attempt. Networking compounds the problem. Desktop applications were never designed to talk to web systems, so connecting one to an e-commerce platform, an ERP system or a customer-facing quotation tool ranges from awkward to impossible. What fills the gap is people retyping numbers between systems, which is slow and introduces errors. ### Performance Bottlenecks Running locally means competing for resources. An optimization run shares a processor with everything else on the machine, so the same job takes different times on different days. Problems involving several materials, many cut patterns or unusual constraints can overwhelm the machine outright, and the usual response is to simplify the job until it fits and accept a worse layout. The cost of that shows up under time pressure. A customer waiting on a website for a price, or a salesperson quoting across a desk, will not wait for a workstation to grind through the arithmetic. Adding capacity is a capital purchase rather than a setting, so the choice is expensive hardware or living with the limit. ### Integration Challenges The deepest limitation is isolation. A desktop optimizer sits outside the systems around it and becomes a silo that manual work has to bridge. An e-commerce platform needs an optimization result before it can quote a price or a delivery date. An ERP system needs the same result to plan purchasing and production. A CRM benefits from knowing what a customer ordered before and how it was cut. Desktop software can supply any of this only through middleware, which costs money to build, breaks when either end changes, and becomes one more thing to maintain. ## The Solution: Cloud-Native Optimization ### Fundamental Advantages of Cloud Architecture Moving the computation to a server changes what is possible rather than merely where it happens. Processing power is allocated per job, so a hard problem gets more of it and an easy one costs less, with no hardware purchase in either direction. Nothing is installed. Updates apply to everyone at once, which means every user runs the same version and gets the same answers, and no one has to do any work to keep that true. Central management also makes access control and audit tractable, and that matters as soon as more than one person is involved. Access follows from the same design. Any device with a connection can reach the optimizer, so a salesperson can quote from a customer's site, a production manager can lay out sheets from the factory floor, and the material utilization reports are readable from wherever the person reading them happens to be. ### Speed as a Competitive Advantage Speed is commercial. A quote returned while the customer is still on the page is worth more than the same quote sent an hour later. Cloud architecture shortens that wait in several ways at once. Work can be spread across processors rather than queued on one. Patterns and solutions computed before can be stored and returned immediately rather than recalculated. Algorithms written for server hardware can assume capabilities that desktop software, which has to run on whatever the customer already owns, cannot. Distance matters too. Running the optimizer near the other systems it exchanges data with cuts the round trip, and balancing load across the platform stops one heavy request from slowing down everyone else. ### Integration Capabilities This is where cloud platforms separate from desktop tools completely. An API lets optimization sit inside an e-commerce checkout, so the price a customer sees reflects a real cutting pattern and the material it consumes rather than an estimate. An ERP system can call the optimizer as part of production planning, so material use is optimized across orders instead of one order at a time. The same interface accepts data from newer sources. Sensors reporting actual board dimensions let the optimizer work from what is on the rack rather than from a nominal size. Machine learning applied to past optimizations can predict material requirements and suggest patterns a human operator would not think to try. ## Cutlist Evolution: Next-Generation Optimization ### Designed for Speed Cutlist Evolution (CLE) was built with performance as a design goal rather than as a later refinement, and that applies to the whole path from engine to interface. For any cutting list there is a hard limit, the fewest sheets the parts can possibly fit on. The optimization engine is measured against that limit on every job, and lands on it for the majority of real production work, meaning no software could have done better on those jobs. The trade it makes is between solution quality and the time taken to reach it, and preprocessing discards redundant calculations before they consume anything. The architecture is built for the platform it runs on. Capacity scales with demand, so a busy Monday morning does not slow down. Frequently used patterns are cached and returned instantly. Work that is not time-critical runs in the background, which keeps urgent requests at the front of the queue. ### Built for Modern Business Optimization is one step inside a larger process, and CLE is designed to be called by the rest of it. The platform exposes full APIs, so it can be connected to an e-commerce site for live quoting, to an ERP system for production planning, or to something built in-house for a workflow nobody else has. The software fits the process rather than the other way round. The interface follows normal web conventions, which keeps training short. It works on a desktop, a tablet or a phone. More than one person can work on the same optimization at once, which cuts down on emailed spreadsheets and the mistakes they carry. Security is treated as a requirement rather than a feature. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is role-based, so people see what their job needs. Activity is logged in full for audit and analysis. ### Enabling Digital Transformation CLE lets a business modernize this part of its operation without a rebuild. Start with one workflow, prove it, then extend. That keeps the risk small and the commitment proportionate to what has actually been demonstrated. The integration is what makes new business models practical. An e-commerce site can quote custom cutting instantly. A manufacturer can give customers a self-service portal and let them optimize their own patterns. A distributor can offer optimization as a service that the competitor down the road does not. ## Use Cases and Applications ### E-Commerce Integration Customers buying online expect a price immediately, including for material cut to their own dimensions. CLE lets the store answer. The customer enters what they need, the engine works out the most efficient cutting pattern and the material it consumes, and accurate pricing comes back within seconds. A quotation that used to take hours or days becomes part of the checkout. ### Quotation and Estimation A salesperson with CLE can quote in the meeting rather than promising a number by Friday. Because the platform is central, the quote reflects current material costs and current availability rather than whatever was on the last spreadsheet anyone downloaded. Historical optimization data covers the awkward cases, which is where quotes usually go wrong and margin quietly disappears. ### Production Planning Optimizing one order at a time leaves material on the table. CLE can optimize across several orders together, finding parts from different jobs that share a sheet, and that is where the largest waste reductions come from. Connected to a production schedule, it also accounts for machine availability and delivery deadlines, so the layouts it produces can actually be cut this week. ## Implementation Considerations ### Migration Strategies Moving off desktop software need not be disruptive. CLE supports a gradual migration, with the old system still running while the new one is proved. Import tools bring across data from legacy systems, including material definitions and past optimization patterns. Running both in parallel for a period lets results be compared before anything is switched off. ### Training and Support The interface is designed to need little training, and the supporting material covers the rest. Online training materials, video tutorials and interactive guides serve the people using it. API documentation and integration guides serve the people connecting it to something else. Support covers both while the transition is under way, which is when the questions arrive. ### ROI and Business Value The return comes from several directions at once. Reduced material waste is money that stops going in the skip, and on material-heavy work that alone can pay for the system within months. Faster quotes win work that slower quotes lose, and let a sales team pursue more of it. Direct integration removes the manual data entry and the errors that come with it. Jobs that were too complex to optimize become jobs you can take on. ## Future Directions ### Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning The next gains in this field come from systems that learn from what they have already solved, and CLE's architecture is where that work will sit. Machine learning can analyze patterns across millions of optimizations to find strategies a human operator would miss. Predictive analytics can tell a business what material it is about to need rather than what it needed last month. ### Industry 4.0 Integration As manufacturing facilities become more connected, CLE will talk to the machines directly. Cutting equipment will take its instructions from the platform rather than from someone typing them in. Measurement data from quality control will travel back the other way, so the engine can adjust in real time for material that is not quite the size it claimed to be. That closed loop removes a whole category of manual intervention. ### Sustainability Focus Waste reduction now carries an environmental case alongside the financial one. Future versions of CLE will report sustainability metrics next to material use, including carbon footprint calculations, recycling optimization and alternative material suggestions, so a business can see the environmental result of a decision at the point of making it. ## Conclusion The move from desktop to cloud is not a version upgrade. It changes what the optimizer can be connected to, how fast it answers, and how many people can rely on the same result. The old constraints stopped being acceptable the moment customers began expecting a price in seconds. Cutlist Evolution is built for that situation. The performance, the integration and the interface all serve one end, which is answering a cutting question quickly enough to be commercially useful. A business still running a desktop optimizer is competing against people who can quote while the customer is still reading the page. So the open question is rarely whether to move. It is when, and which workflow to move first. One workflow, connected properly and measured against the old way, will answer that better than any paper can. --- ## Related Articles - [How a cutlist optimizer works](/articles/how-cutlist-optimizer-works) - [Running a cut-to-size business](/articles/cut-to-size-business) - [The best cutlist optimizers in 2026](/articles/best-cutlist-optimizer-2026) --- # Nesting from AutoCAD URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/autocad-nesting > Nest AutoCAD drawings without buying a nesting add-on. Export DXF, import into Cutlist Evolution, and cut the true contour on a CNC. AutoCAD draws the part. It does not nest it. Working out how to fit fifty of those parts onto a sheet with the least waste is a different problem, and the add-ons that do it inside AutoCAD are priced for a machine shop rather than a one-person workshop. There is a shorter route, and you already have the file for it. Export the parts as **DXF**, open them in **Cutlist Evolution**, and the nest is worked out from the real contours. Nothing is redrawn. --- ## Step 1: Draw each part as a closed outline The one thing that matters is that each part is a **closed** shape. An outline with a gap in it is not a boundary, so it cannot be nested against or cut from. Work in a single layer per part where you can, keep construction lines and dimension text off the geometry you are exporting, and join segments into polylines rather than leaving them as separate lines. Holes you want cut are closed shapes too, drawn inside the outline. ## Step 2: Export as DXF, one part per file AutoCAD writes DXF natively. Export each part, or select the parts you want and export the selection. DXF is a drawing rather than a model, so it carries the contour and nothing else. That is exactly what a nest needs. It is also why the format is worth preferring here over a 3D export: there is no solid to interpret, no thickness to infer, and no unit ambiguity in the geometry itself. ## Step 3: Import and choose the cutting mode Drop the DXF files into Cutlist Evolution. This is the step where the decision gets made, and it is worth understanding because it changes what you get. **In nesting mode** the true contour is kept, and each part is packed as its own shape. A curved bracket nests as a curved bracket, and parts tuck inside each other's concavities. This is what you want for laser, plasma, waterjet or a router. **In rectangular cutting** a shaped part cannot be cut as drawn, so each contour becomes its bounding box. That is the right answer for a panel saw, which can only make edge-to-edge cuts, and the wrong one for a CNC, because you pay for the corners you did not need. Set the mode before you import and you get the layout you were expecting. ## Step 4: Set kerf, spacing and stock A nest is only correct if it knows the width of the cut. Set the kerf to your tool's actual cut width, add part-to-part spacing if your process needs it, and enter the plate or sheet sizes you can buy. Then let it run. The optimizer packs the parts, and the result is a layout you can read, a material figure you can quote from, and a DXF you can send to the machine. ## What this replaces The comparison worth making is not against drawing the nest by hand, which nobody does past about ten parts. It is against buying a nesting module for AutoCAD. A nesting add-on is an annual licence tied to a seat. This route is a browser tab, and the DXF you already produce is the interface between them. If nesting is a thing you do occasionally rather than all day, that is a large difference in cost for the same output. There is a real tradeoff: an add-on lives inside AutoCAD and this does not. You export, nest, and bring the result back. On a job of any size that is a few seconds against the hours a bad nest costs in material. --- Before you commit a real job to it, run one part through. Draw a shape you know the area of, export it, import it, and check the dimensions come back as you expect. Once you trust that, the rest is the same three clicks each time. --- ## Related Articles - [Every import route: DXF, SVG, CAD and spreadsheets](/import-formats) - [Plate nesting for steel and aluminium](/plate-nesting-calculator) - [Turn a 3D model into a cut list](/3d-model-cut-list) - [The stock cutting problem](/articles/stock-cutting-problem) - [The best nesting software](/articles/best-nesting-software), Deepnest, SVGnest, Autodesk and Nest&Cut compared --- # The best cutlist optimizers in 2026 URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/best-cutlist-optimizer-2026 > We compare seven cutlist optimizers, free and paid, on real benchmarks: optimisation quality, speed, export formats and price. Every cutlist optimizer promises to minimise waste, and in screenshots they all look much the same. (Both spellings are common, cutlist and cut list.) Three differences decide which one you should be using: how many boards a layout actually needs, how long the software takes to produce it, and whether your saw can cut the result. None of the three is visible in a screenshot. They show up when you run the same job through several tools and count what comes out. That is what this ranking is built on. We build one of the tools on the list, which is a reason to read it carefully rather than a reason to ignore it. What we can offer against the obvious objection is numbers. Every claim below comes from a published comparison or benchmark run on identical inputs, linked at the point it is made, so you can check it yourself. For the wider software category, including industrial nesting and machine integration, see [the best cutting optimization software](/articles/best-cutting-optimization-software). This page is about picking a tool. ## What actually matters when choosing a cutlist optimizer Six things separate these tools in practice. ### Optimisation quality (board count) Fewer boards for the same parts is the whole point, and it is measurable. Give several tools identical parts, stock and kerf, then count the boards each one comes back with. The differences are real. In [our OptiCutter benchmark](/articles/opticutter-benchmark), a 2,786-part construction project needed 1,176 sheets with OptiCutter and 1,125 with Cutlist Evolution. That is 51 fewer sheets, at 85% yield against 78%. On a hard 39-shape packing test, the gap was a whole doubled material order. There is a stronger measure than any head-to-head, and it is a harsh one. For any cutting list a limit exists, a stock count below which the parts will not fit however clever the software. The engine behind Cutlist Evolution is measured against that limit on every job. Across 2,083 real production jobs it lands on it 82% of the time, which means no software could have done better on those jobs. ### Speed Speed matters twice over. It matters while you are iterating on a project, and it matters constantly if optimisation sits inside a quoting workflow. On nine benchmarks with identical inputs, SmartCut Fast (the engine behind Cutlist Evolution) finished every job in under 3 seconds. The web-based competitors took anything from a few seconds to over two minutes on the same inputs, which puts the engine 10–100× ahead. Typical solve time is under two seconds. ### Kerf, trim cuts and edge banding A layout that ignores blade thickness, the kerf, is wrong by a few millimetres on every cut. That is enough to ruin the last part on a sheet. Any serious optimizer handles kerf. Fewer handle stock trim cuts, meaning squaring the raw edge before parts are cut, or edge banding allowances. If you band panels, check this before anything else. ### Grain direction control On visible panels, parts have to hold a fixed orientation. Look for per-part orientation locking. Most of the tools here support it, though it is worth confirming for the material types you use. ### Export formats A cutting diagram on screen is the minimum. Check for PDF cut plans, CSV part lists and printable part labels. If you run a CNC, panel saw or beam saw, check for DXF and PTX output your machine can consume. ### Price and free tiers Free tiers vary in shape more than in size. Some cap parts per calculation, some cap saved projects, some cap how many calculations you can run. Match the cap to the way you work. A hobbyist building one wardrobe cares about parts per job. A business quoting daily cares about calculation volume. ## 1. Cutlist Evolution: best cutlist optimizer overall [Cutlist Evolution](/) runs in the browser. Nothing to install, no platform requirement. It is powered by the SmartCut optimisation engine, whose Fast and Max modes are benchmarked across 2,083 real production jobs: 82% land on the fewest stock the parts could ever fit into, with a typical result in under two seconds. Breadth is what puts it first. It handles sheet, linear and roll materials, trim cuts and edge banding, offcut management and visualisation, and cost estimates, with settings for table saws, beam saws and CNC. Exports run to PDF, CSV, SVG, DXF and PTX, plus printable labels. Full feature rundowns are in our [CutList Optimizer comparison](/articles/comparison-cutlist-optimizer) and [OptiCutter benchmark](/articles/opticutter-benchmark). The free tier gives unlimited calculations with up to 40 parts each, unlimited stock, 3 saved projects and PDF export. Paid plans (Starter, Pro, Expert, Enterprise) raise the limits in tiers. Pro adds trim cuts, edge banding, CSV export and printable labels. Expert adds beam saw calculations, SVG/DXF/PTX export and unbranded exports. Enterprise adds a material and stock cloud database with automatic stock tracking and multiple saw profiles. That tiering is the main cost of choosing it. The most advanced capabilities, beam saw settings and the machine-format exports, sit on the higher plans, and the 40-part cap on the free tier rules out very large projects without paying. Pick it if you want the best board counts available in a browser, from a free weekend project up to production beam-saw work. [Start with the guide](/guide/) or [try it free](/). ## 2. CutList Optimizer: simplest for hobbyists [CutList Optimizer](https://www.cutlistoptimizer.com) is one of the most searched-for tools in this category and the popularity is earned. It is simple and approachable, and it covers the essentials: part orientation locking, spreadsheet import, edge banding, material thicknesses and saved projects. Low-friction sheet layouts for hobbyists, small workshops and education are where it does its best work. The feature set stops at sheets. No linear or roll materials, no printable labels, no stock trim cuts, no saw-specific settings, no DXF/SVG/PTX export, no offcut visualisation and no inventory management. The full breakdown is in [our comparison](/articles/comparison-cutlist-optimizer). It is also the slowest tool in our benchmarks, taking 95–122 seconds on several mid-size jobs, with an internal ceiling of roughly two minutes regardless of the budget you give it, and a part limit that stopped it completing our 256-part benchmark. Current pricing is on cutlistoptimizer.com. Pick it if your work is straightforward sheet jobs, you can wait on the bigger lists, and familiarity is worth more to you than features. ## 3. OptiCutter: quick web layouts for one-off jobs [OptiCutter](https://www.opticutter.com) is a web-based cutting diagram generator, and it is the one to reach for when you want a layout in the next minute. It was the fastest of the third-party web tools in our nine-job benchmark, at roughly 3–29 seconds per job, and it found the single-board solution on one 20-part test. For a fast, no-fuss sheet diagram in a single material, that is the right shape of tool. Weighing a switch in either direction? See the [OptiCutter alternative](/alternatives/opticutter) page. The limits arrive as the job grows. Each calculation takes one material and one thickness. There is no offcut management, no cut measurements, no cost estimates, no saw settings, no first-cut direction choice and no project sharing ([feature table here](/articles/opticutter-benchmark)). On harder packing problems it leaves boards on the table. Our 39-shape test took it 2 sheets at 49.1% yield where 1 sheet at 98.2% was achievable, and on the 2,786-part project it used 51 more sheets than Cutlist Evolution. Current pricing is on opticutter.com. Pick it if you need a quick diagram for a small, single-material job and nothing beyond the layout itself. ## 4. Magi-Cut: strongest desktop optimizer in our tests Magi-Cut is a Windows desktop application and the strongest non-SmartCut performer in our nine-benchmark head-to-head. It matched the best result on most jobs and found the winning layout on two of them, a single board on the 39-part test and 4 boards on the 96-part test. SmartCut Max still matches or beats it on 7 of the 9. If what you want is board counts from traditional desktop software, this is the one. The direct comparison is on the [Magi-Cut alternative](/alternatives/magi-cut) page. The cost is the platform. It is a Windows-only install in a category that has moved to the browser, so there is no running it from a tablet at the saw and no sharing a project by link. Running locally also means its timings are not directly comparable with the web tools, which is why our comparison used board counts on the same saw input format. It is sold as a commercial desktop licence, with pricing on enquiry from the vendor. Pick it if you want a proven offline desktop optimizer, you are on Windows, and browser-based workflow is not something you need. ## 5. SmartCut: best for embedding optimisation in your own product [SmartCut](https://smartcut.dev) is the API version of the same engine that powers Cutlist Evolution. Rather than a calculator you visit, it is optimisation you build into your own website, e-commerce store or software, and it is the brain behind online cut-to-size configurators. The published numbers are the engine benchmarks quoted throughout this piece: across 2,083 real jobs, 82% land on the fewest stock possible, with a typical result in under two seconds. The [head-to-head results](https://smartcut.dev/benchmarks) against Magi-Cut, OptiCutter and CutList Optimizer are published too. It is an API, not an end-user app. If you only want to optimise your own cutting lists, use Cutlist Evolution instead. Where SmartCut earns its place is automated, customer-facing optimisation: instant quotes and cut-to-size ordering on your own site. Paid plans are priced on the number of parts requested, and a test environment is available on request. Pick it if you are a material supplier or a cut-to-size business wiring optimisation into your sales pipeline. See [setting up a cut-to-size business](/articles/cut-to-size-business). ## 6. Biesse OptiPlanner: the bundled beam saw optimizer OptiPlanner is the optimiser shipped with Biesse beam saws, which makes it the default for a lot of industrial shops. It is integrated, it is supported by the machine vendor, and the layouts it produces are ones the saw is guaranteed to accept. For a Biesse owner that is zero-setup optimisation, and it is included with the saw. Bundled does not mean unbeatable. Run over more than 2,000 real production jobs with identical parts, stock, kerf and trim, and with every layout checked as genuinely cuttable in Biesse's own file format, SmartCut Max finished more than 100 stock ahead of OptiPlanner in total. Pick it if you run a Biesse saw and want the fully integrated path. It is still worth benchmarking your own jobs against an alternative before you assume the bundled optimiser is the ceiling. ## 7. CAD cutlist workflows: Fusion 360 and Shapr3D Neither of these is an optimizer, but so many projects start in CAD that the route earns a place on the list. Autodesk Fusion 360 and Shapr3D can both export a design as OBJ for direct import into a cutlist optimizer, which then extracts the rectangular parts, their dimensions and their quantities on its own. Nobody retypes a parts list, and a finished 3D design becomes an optimised cutting list in minutes. The automated extraction works on rectangular parts, so shaped components need handling separately, and you still need an optimizer at the other end. Take this route if you design first and cut second. There are step-by-step guides for [creating a cut list from Fusion 360](/articles/fusion-360-cutlist) and [creating a cut list from Shapr3D](/articles/shapr3d-cutlist). ## Cutlist optimizer comparison table Feature-by-feature, from our published comparisons ([CutList Optimizer](/articles/comparison-cutlist-optimizer), [OptiCutter](/articles/opticutter-benchmark)). A dash means the feature wasn't covered in those comparisons. | Feature | Cutlist Evolution | CutList Optimizer | OptiCutter | |---------|-------------------|-------------------|------------| | Sheet materials | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | | Linear & roll materials | ✓ | ✗ | – | | Edge banding | ✓ | ✓ | – | | Stock trim cuts | ✓ | ✗ | – | | Multiple materials & thicknesses | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | | Offcut management & visualisation | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | | Cost estimates | ✓ | – | ✗ | | Saw settings (table, beam & CNC) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | | Share projects via link | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | | Printable labels | ✓ | ✗ | – | | DXF, CSV, SVG & PTX export | ✓ | ✗ | – | | Stock inventory management | ✓ | ✗ | – | On Cutlist Evolution, some of these features are plan-gated. Labels and CSV arrive on Pro, and beam saw settings plus DXF/SVG/PTX export on Expert. ## What the benchmarks say Four sets of numbers sit under this ranking. Nine benchmarks were run across five tools on identical inputs. SmartCut Fast finished all nine jobs in under 3 seconds, 10–100× faster than the web-based tools. SmartCut Max matched or beat Magi-Cut on 7 of the 9, and beat OptiCutter and CutList Optimizer on every job where the tools differed. Across 2,083 real production jobs, the engine lands on the fewest stock the parts could ever fit into 82% of the time. That is a result no software can improve on, only match. Against the optimiser that comes with the machine, SmartCut Max saved more than 100 stock versus Biesse OptiPlanner across more than 2,000 real jobs. At real-project scale, a 2,786-part construction job needed 51 fewer sheets with Cutlist Evolution than with OptiCutter, at 85% yield against 78%. The [full write-up is here](/articles/opticutter-benchmark). ## Frequently asked questions ### Is there a free cutlist optimizer? Yes. Cutlist Evolution's free tier gives unlimited calculations with up to 40 parts each, unlimited stock, 3 saved projects and PDF export. That is enough to run real jobs before committing, with nothing to install. [Try it here](/). Several other tools on this list offer free usage as well, so check each vendor's site for current terms. ### Do I need to install anything to use a cutlist optimizer? Not any more. Cutlist Evolution, CutList Optimizer and OptiCutter all run in the browser. Desktop tools such as Magi-Cut still need a Windows installation. The trade-off is convenience and sharing on one side, offline operation on the other. ### How much material does a cutlist optimizer actually save? Most shops see 10–15% material savings after adopting optimisation software, and some reach 20% or more. There is more on why in [how a cutlist optimizer works](/articles/how-cutlist-optimizer-works). Which tool you pick matters as well. On our benchmark projects, the gap between the best and the weakest optimizer on the same job ran from one extra sheet to 51 extra sheets. ### What's the difference between a cutlist optimizer and cutting optimization software? They largely overlap. A cutlist optimizer is usually the tool a woodworker or panel shop uses to turn a parts list into cutting diagrams. Cutting optimization software is the broader category, covering everything from hobbyist sheet layout up to industrial nesting and machine integration. We cover the broader category in [the best cutting optimization software](/articles/best-cutting-optimization-software). ### Can a cutlist optimizer drive a beam saw or CNC? The professional ones can. Look for saw-aware settings (kerf, trim, first-cut direction, machine constraints) and machine-readable exports. Cutlist Evolution produces DXF and PTX output and has dedicated settings for table saws, beam saws and CNC on its Expert plan. Whatever you choose has to respect your machine's constraints, because a layout that is optimal on screen and uncuttable on the saw has saved you nothing. ## Related articles - [Comparison with cutlistoptimizer.com](/articles/comparison-cutlist-optimizer) - [OptiCutter benchmark](/articles/opticutter-benchmark) - [The best cutting optimization software](/articles/best-cutting-optimization-software) - [How a Cutlist Optimizer works](/articles/how-cutlist-optimizer-works) - [The best nesting software](/articles/best-nesting-software), Deepnest, SVGnest, Autodesk and Nest&Cut compared --- # The best nesting software URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/best-nesting-software > Deepnest, SVGnest, Autodesk Fusion, Nest&Cut and Cutlist Evolution compared on algorithm, part limits, file formats and what they cost to run. Nesting software packs irregular shapes onto a sheet. Not rectangles, which is a different and much easier problem, but real outlines with curves and concave pockets that other parts can sit inside. Get it right and a job that needed four plates needs three. The market splits in a way that is worth understanding before you compare features. At one end sit open-source projects written by one person, free and genuinely capable. At the other sit CAM extensions and cloud services priced for a fabrication shop, from around $500 a year upwards. In between there is very little, which is why so many people end up running a browser tool alongside software that cost them a subscription. We build one of the five tools below. That is a reason to check our claims rather than a reason to skip the page, so every figure here comes from the vendor's own published material and is stated plainly enough to verify. ## What actually separates them Four things, and only one of them shows up in a screenshot. **The algorithm.** Almost every true-shape nester in this price range descends from the same idea: No Fit Polygon to work out where two outlines can touch without overlapping, then a search to decide the order parts go down in. The differences are in the search and in how long you let it run. **Part count.** This is the limit people hit first. A genetic search over irregular outlines gets slower as parts multiply, so free tiers cap it and open source projects slow down rather than stopping. **What it reads and writes.** DXF is the common currency. SVG suits laser and vinyl work. If a tool takes only one of them, that decides things for you before any layout quality does. **Where it runs.** A desktop install, a browser tab, or inside CAD you already pay for. This matters more than it sounds, because it decides whether the person who needs the nest can get one without an IT request. ## Deepnest Open source, desktop, and the one most people are sent to first. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, reads DXF, SVG and Corel CDR, and writes DXF and SVG. Two features are unusual at any price. It does part-in-part placement, so small parts drop into the holes of larger ones. And it merges shared lines automatically, so a laser does not cut the same path twice, which saves time on the machine rather than material on the sheet. It will also nest bitmap images for laser engraving. The project describes itself as free as in beer and free as in speech. There is no tier, no part cap and no account. **Choose it if** you are cutting on a laser or plasma table, you are comfortable installing desktop software, and you want line merging without paying for it. ## SVGnest The original browser implementation, MIT licensed, written by Jack000. Deepnest grew out of this work, so the family resemblance is not a coincidence. It uses a genetic algorithm over the No Fit Polygon approach, runs entirely in the browser, and takes SVG files with outline-based shapes. The author is straightforward about what that costs: the demo is CPU intensive, mobile is warned against, and performance becomes comparable to commercial software after roughly five minutes of optimisation. Part-in-part and concave exploration are both noted as resource-intensive. **Choose it if** you want to understand how nesting works, or you have a small number of SVG parts and no wish to install anything. It is a reference implementation that happens to be usable, rather than a product. ## Autodesk Fusion, Manufacturing Extension Nesting inside Fusion is not part of the base subscription. It arrived as the Nesting and Fabrication Extension and now sits inside the Manufacturing Extension, which also carries 4- and 5-axis machining and metal additive. It produces associative multi-sheet and multi-material nests, which is the real argument for it: change the model and the nest updates, because the nest and the CAD are the same document. Autodesk prices extensions from $495 per user per year, with the range running to around $1,465. There is a 30-day free window. **Choose it if** you already model in Fusion and machine from it. The associativity is worth real money in that workflow and is not available from anything else on this list. If you do not already pay for Fusion, this is an expensive way to buy a nester. ## Nest&Cut A cloud service, browser-based with nothing to install, aimed squarely at production. It reads DXF and writes DXF, PDF reports and NC programs, and covers composites, cardboard, foam, stone, wood panels, sheet metal and food products. Pricing starts at $60 a month, with a 30-day trial that needs no card. The company claims about 30 seconds from import to result and describes an algorithm refined over 45 years. **Choose it if** you nest daily, you need NC output rather than a drawing, and a monthly fee is easier to justify than an annual licence. ## Cutlist Evolution Ours. Browser-based, no install, and the nesting mode is part of the same tool that does rectangular cutting, so one parts list can be cut either way. True-shape nesting for irregular polygons, DXF import from any CAD package, automatic rotation for the tightest fit, kerf-aware spacing between every part, common-line cutting to share edges, and lead-in and lead-out paths for CNC. Export goes to DXF, SVG and G-code for laser, plasma, waterjet and router. The free tier runs to 40 parts per nest, which covers most one-off jobs and is where you should test it. Paid plans raise that to 150, 300, 1,000 and 2,000. Current prices are on the [plans page](/plans). **Choose it if** you want true-shape nesting and rectangular cutting from one parts list, or you need something a person can open in a browser and use the same day. ## How to choose, in one paragraph each **Cutting on a laser or plasma table, occasionally.** Deepnest. Line merging and part-in-part for nothing is hard to argue with, and the desktop install is a one-off cost in patience. **Already inside Fusion.** The Manufacturing Extension, because associative nests are worth more than a slightly better packing you have to re-import by hand. **Nesting every day, with NC output.** Nest&Cut, or a shop-floor CAM package above this price range. At that volume the subscription is not the expensive part of your week. **Mixed work, some rectangular and some shaped.** Cutlist Evolution, because running two tools over one parts list is where mistakes get made. **Learning, or nesting a handful of SVGs.** SVGnest. The one thing worth doing before you commit is running your own worst job through two of them and counting sheets. Layout quality varies by the shape of what you cut, and a tool that wins on long thin parts can lose on round ones. Nobody's benchmark, including ours, predicts your job as well as your job does. ## Related reading - [Nesting optimizer](/nesting-optimizer), true-shape nesting in the browser - [Plate nesting calculator](/plate-nesting-calculator), for steel and aluminium - [Nesting from AutoCAD](/articles/autocad-nesting), the DXF route end to end - [The bin packing problem](/articles/bin-packing-problem), the maths underneath - [The best cutting optimization software](/articles/best-cutting-optimization-software), the wider category --- # Cut lists from SketchUp URL: https://cutlistevo.com/articles/sketchup-cutlist > Turn a SketchUp model into an optimised cut list with the free Cutlist Evolution extension. No export, no file, no retyping. **SketchUp** already knows the size of every panel you have drawn. Getting those sizes out as a **cut list** you can take to the saw is the part that costs an afternoon, because it usually means reading dimensions off the screen and typing them into a spreadsheet one row at a time. There is a shorter route, and it does not involve a file. The free **Cutlist Evolution extension** walks your model inside SketchUp, measures every component, and sends the parts straight into **Cutlist Evolution** for you to check. Nothing is exported, nothing is retyped, and nothing reaches your cutlist until you press Import. --- ## Step 1: Install the extension You do this once. 1. Download the Cutlist Evolution extension, an `.rbz` file. 2. In SketchUp, choose **Window → Extension Manager → Install Extension**, and pick the `.rbz`. 3. Accept the unsigned extension prompt if SketchUp shows one. 4. The extension appears at **Extensions → Cutlist Evolution → Send to Cutlist Evolution**. SketchUp 2021 or newer is required, on Windows or macOS. ## Step 2: Draw in groups and components Nothing here asks you to model differently, but one habit matters. The extension reads **groups and components**, so each panel you want on the cut list should be one. A component holding other components is walked into, contributing its sides, top and shelves rather than arriving as one large board. Two details save trouble later. Dimensions are read from each component's own axes, so a rotated part measures the same as an unrotated one. Hidden components are left out, which is a useful way to keep a jig or a reference block off the list. ## Step 3: Send the model 1. In Cutlist Evolution, open the **Import** panel and choose the **SketchUp** tab. It shows a connection code. 2. In SketchUp, choose **Extensions → Cutlist Evolution → Send to Cutlist Evolution**. 3. Paste the code into **Connection code**. 4. Set **Units** to the unit the panel says you are working in. 5. Choose **Whole model** or **Selection only**. 6. Press **Send**. Set the units carefully. The two ends exchange bare numbers, so a mismatch is a silent 25.4x error rather than an obvious failure. Codes last about fifteen minutes and keep working until they expire, so you can send, adjust the model in SketchUp, and send again without pairing twice. There is no account and no sign-in. The pairing code is the whole connection. ## Step 4: Check the parts, then import The parts arrive as a table beside a 3D preview of the model as it stands in SketchUp, with the same explode slider and controls as the 3D Model tab. Edit any value, remove any row you do not want, then press **Import**, or **Discard** to throw the whole delivery away. Two things are worth looking at before you commit. **Shaped parts.** Anything that is not a rectangle is spotted for you, marked **Shaped**, drawn amber as its true outline, and the row states what squaring it off would cost, in the form *Squares off to 600 x 400, +25% waste*. This tab imports into rectangular cutting, so shaped parts are squared off to that enclosing rectangle. Untick **Square off shaped parts** and they are held back instead, staying in the table for you to edit or remove while everything else imports. **Assemblies.** The extension reports which component or group each part came from, so parts you drew together can be cut together. Tick **Group parts by assembly** and each assembly becomes a [group](/guide/#groups): a block of parts cut in the arrangement you drew them in, with grain and pattern running continuously across the joins. An assembly is only grouped when its parts share a material and a thickness, lie in one flat face, face the same way round, and do not overlap. Anything else imports loose, with a notice naming the assembly and the reason. ## What the extension saves The obvious saving is the typing. A kitchen of thirty panels is thirty rows you do not transcribe, and thirty chances to mistype a number that you never take. The larger saving is that there is no file in the middle. Exporting a model, finding it, and dragging it in is a step that goes stale the moment you nudge a shelf in SketchUp. Sending directly means the cut list always reflects the model as it is now, and re-sending after a change costs one menu click. Accuracy comes from the same place. The extension measures the geometry rather than reading a dimension someone typed, so the cut list is exactly as precise as the model is. Then Cutlist Evolution nests the parts onto your stock sheets to keep offcut waste down, so the material bill for the job falls. Design and cutting run as one sequence instead of two. ## If you would rather use a file The extension is the shortest route, but it is not the only one. SketchUp exports **Collada (DAE)**, which the **3D Model** tab reads like any other model, and Collada states its own units so the sizes arrive exact. There is one reason to prefer it. The SketchUp tab imports into rectangular cutting, so shaped parts arrive squared off. If you want shaped parts cut as their true outline on a CNC, use a Collada export with the 3D Model tab in nesting mode instead. --- Before you commit a whole project to this route, send one carcass through it. Draw a single cabinet, send it, and check the parts come back with the dimensions you expect. Once you trust that, drawing in components from the outset costs you nothing. --- ## Related Articles - [Turn a 3D model into a cut list](/3d-model-cut-list) - [Creating cut lists with Autodesk Fusion 360](/articles/fusion-360-cutlist) - [Creating Cut Lists with Shapr3D](/articles/shapr3d-cutlist) - [Cut List Optimization for Cabinet Builders](/articles/benefits-cabinet-builders) --- # 3D Model Cutlist Generator URL: https://cutlistevo.com/guide/3d-model-cutlist > Turn a 3D model into a cutting list. Drop an OBJ, STL, STEP, 3MF, glTF, PLY or Collada file, or send one from SketchUp, and every panel is measured. The **3D model cutlist generator** turns a 3D model into a cutting list. It measures every panel in the model, works out what each one is, merges the duplicates, and hands you a list you can send to the optimiser, export as a CSV, or print as a bill of materials. It has a page of its own at **/app/import-3d**. Two ways to get there: - The main menu (top right) → **3D model cutlist generator**. - The **Import** panel → **Import 3D model**. There are two tabs, and they end in the same place: - **Import Model** - drop a file exported from your CAD software. - **Import SketchUp** - send a model live from SketchUp, with no file to export. Once you have a model on screen, a **Project name** field appears at the top. It defaults to the dropped file's name and titles the bill of materials and the print job, so it is worth changing `cabinet_v3_final.dae` to something you would hand to a supplier. ## Import Model ### Supported Formats - OBJ - STL - PLY - glTF / GLB - 3MF - Collada (DAE) - STEP (`.step` / `.stp`) ### Exporting from Your CAD Software Hide or delete anything you don't want cut before you export - fixings, appliances, worktops - then export the model. - **SketchUp** - export as Collada (DAE), or skip the file entirely and use the [Import SketchUp](#import-sketchup) tab. - **Fusion 360** - export as OBJ or STEP. - **Shapr3D** - export as STEP or STL. - **Onshape** - export as STEP. ### Dropping Files Drop one file, or several at once. A job is rarely one export - doors from one file, carcasses from another - so a multi-file drop is read as a single model: one part list, one set of merged quantities, one preview. When you drop more than one file, any part the file didn't name takes its file's name instead, so you can tell which export each row came from. ### Model Units **Model units** is what the numbers in the file mean, and **Convert imported dimensions to** is the unit you want them in. 3MF, Collada and STEP state their own units, so **Model units** is shown as locked rather than offered - the file has already answered the question. OBJ, STL, PLY and glTF carry no unit at all, so those are the formats that get a dropdown, and you have to check it yourself. Getting this wrong is silent - every part stays correct relative to every other, so a whole cabinet can arrive in tenths of a millimetre looking perfectly consistent. Two things guard against it: - The summary shows **Whole model measures**, the size of the entire model in the units you're reading it as. A cabinet reading 1 × 0.9 × 0.5 is obviously not millimetres. - If the model is barely wider than your saw's blade, it can't be the right unit. The panel says so and offers a button to re-read the file in the unit that makes sense of it. Changing either dropdown rescales the parts immediately - the model isn't re-read, so you can try a unit and change your mind. ### Settings Everything below is under **Settings**, above the drop zone. **Add to existing parts** lives there too: tick it and the import adds to the parts already in your cutlist instead of replacing them, with matching rows having their quantity increased rather than being repeated. ### Merging Duplicates **Merge identical parts** collapses matching parts into one row with a quantity. The summary tells you how many duplicates were merged. **Treat mirrored parts as identical** also merges a part with its mirror image. It is off by default, and should stay off when the sheet has a face, a grain direction or machining on one side - a mirrored panel is then a different part, not another copy of the same one. :::note These two settings are shared with the **Import SketchUp** tab. They describe how the geometry is read, which is the same question however the geometry arrived, so setting either one here sets it there too. ::: ### Round Holes **Convert round holes to drilling** turns round holes into drilling operations on the part rather than treating them as geometry. Rectangular cutting would otherwise lose them entirely. Nesting cuts them out as polygons unless they're converted, so with this on they're drilled instead of cut. Holes that aren't round are left as they are. ### Orientation and Grain **Set orientation from model** locks each part the way round it was drawn, so a part whose length runs along the model's length keeps that direction against the stock grain. **Reverse part orientation** flips that reading, for a model drawn the other way round - one tick rather than a re-export. **Default stock grain** sets the grain on any stock the import creates. It only appears when **Set orientation from model** is on, because the parts' locks are resolved against the stock's grain. ### Creating Stock **Create matching stock** adds one stock item for each material and thickness combination in the import, at the **Default stock length** and **Default stock width** you give. Check the sizes afterwards in the **Inputs** panel. You don't have to use it - see [Materials](#materials) for the same job done while the parts are still on screen, and note that the import creates a board for any material that still hasn't got one on its way out. ## The Parts Table Every analysed part is one editable row. The dimensions, name and material are yours to change - what the analysis measured is the starting point, not the last word. | Column | What it is | |---|---| | Include | Whether this part is imported. Follows the role unless you override it. | | Colour | The colour this part is drawn in, in the 3D preview. Click to change it. | | Shape | The part's outline, drawn to scale. | | Length / Width / Thick. | Editable. A zero or blank one is flagged. | | Qty | How many, after duplicates are merged. | | Name / Material | Editable. | | Type | What the part **will be cut as** - see below. | | Role | What you want done with it - see [Roles](#roles). | Above the table, **All**, **Rectangles** and **Shapes** filter the list, each with its own count. ### The Type Badge The **Type** badge says what will happen to the part, not what the mesh is: - **Rectangle** - a plain rectangular panel. - **Shape** - not a rectangle, and it will be cut as drawn. - **Squared off** / **Squared +25%** - a shape that is about to be cut as its enclosing rectangle, with what that costs in wasted material. - **Not a panel** - the analysis could not read it as a flat cuttable panel. - **Problem** - something is wrong with the row and it can't be imported. The check under the row says what. A shape only reads **Squared** when the commit will actually square it off. Squaring is resolved per material (see [Next Steps](#next-steps)), so a shape sitting in a material that nests is cut as drawn however its own row is marked. ## Roles The **Role** column is the one decision the importer asks you to make, and it is per row. | Role | Means | |---|---| | **Rect** | Cut as a plain rectangle. Any outline is dropped. | | **Nest** | Cut as its true shape on a CNC. The outline and holes are kept. | | **No cut** | A real part that is not cut here - glass, or something bought in. Stays in the list and in the CSV, and appears under **Supplied parts** on the bill of materials, but never goes to the optimiser. | | **Skip** | Not a cuttable panel - hardware, a fixture, a fitting. Left out of the cutlist, and listed under **Hardware** on the bill of materials. | Roles are pre-selected from what the analysis found. Change any of them and the 3D preview re-tints immediately - the legend under the preview explains the colours. ## Shapes and Squaring Off Picking **Rect** on a shape **is** squaring it off: the part is cut at its tightest enclosing rectangle, and the cost appears in that row's Type badge. To do it to everything at once, use **Square off all shapes** in the **Next steps** panel. It tells you what it would cost as a percentage of those parts' area before you press it, and **Put the shapes back** undoes it - nothing is written but roles, so it is safe to try. There is also a per-material offer. Where squaring one material's shapes off is cheap enough to be worth mentioning, its row in **Next steps** carries a **Square them off instead** button. ## Checks Anything worth checking - open meshes, parts that aren't flat panels, a thickness that isn't the smallest dimension, parts that overlap each other, parts larger than your stock - is shown **under the row it is about**, so the problem and the part are in one glance. Warnings are yours to judge. Errors can't be imported, and those rows can't be ticked. A **Checks** panel appears below the table only for checks about the **file** rather than about any one part, which have no row to sit under. When there are none, there is no panel. ## The 3D Preview The preview shows the model with each part coloured by its role, and a legend below it. - **Assembly** / **Tiled** - the model as it was drawn, or every part laid flat in a grid like a cut list. - **Explode** - drag the slider, or use the 0% / 50% / 100% buttons, to pull the parts apart. Assembly view only. - **Fit** - frame the whole model again. - **Expand** - open the preview full size. Your view is kept when you expand or collapse. - Click a part to select it and its row scrolls into view. Click a row to highlight the part. Right-click a part for its actions, including **Square off to a rectangle**. Mouse and keyboard: - **drag** - orbit - **arrow keys** - orbit - **shift + arrow keys** - pan - **+** / **-** - zoom - **F** - fit - **E** - explode - **Esc** - deselect ## Materials The **Materials** section groups the parts by material and thickness and says where each name came from: from the file, matched to your stock, set by you, or not set at all. Type a name into any group and every part in it updates. The edit button on a material row opens the full material editor - cost, material type, optimisation and the saw overrides - and those settings are stamped onto the real materials after the import. **Create stock for N materials** adds a board for every material that hasn't got one, without touching a board you have already sized and costed. The button says what is left to do, so a disabled **Every material has stock** is the answer to "is there anything to do here" without pressing it. You don't have to use it: the import creates the missing boards on its way out anyway. ## Next Steps The **Next steps** panel is the end of the flow. It opens with a count - how many parts are ready, how many rectangles, how many shapes - and then one row per material group. Each material row shows its thickness, its part count, how many shapes it holds, and the optimisation it will run under: - **Rectangular** - an ordinary saw. Shapes in this material are squared off. - **Nesting** - a CNC. Shapes are cut as drawn, and rectangles nest alongside them. The choice is **per material**, not for the whole job: a shaped worktop can nest while the carcass it sits on runs on the panel saw. It is pre-selected from the parts' roles and marked **detected** until you choose one yourself, and the note under each row spells out what that material will do and what it costs. A material whose parts are long pieces sharing a cross-section is also marked **Linear · detected**. Sheet is the default and isn't stated. Linear is a real claim, and you can disagree with it in that material's own settings. Four ways out: - **Import to optimiser** - commits the parts, adds a board for any material that hasn't got one, and takes you to the optimiser. - **Export parts CSV** - Name, Length, Width, Thickness, Quantity, Material, Role. This is the round-trip format: it can be imported again. - **Bill of materials** - a printable document, sectioned into **Cut parts**, **Supplied parts**, **Hardware** and **Materials**, with costs where every material has one. This is the document you hand to a supplier, and it carries the rows the optimiser never sees. - **BOM as CSV** - the same content flat, with a Category column, for a spreadsheet. After importing, check the result in the **Inputs** panel, where you can edit or bulk edit the parts. ## Import SketchUp Send panels straight from SketchUp into your cutlist, with no file to export. The Cutlist Evolution extension walks the model, measures every component and pushes the parts across for you to review. This needs no account and no sign-in. The short pairing code is the whole connection, and nothing reaches your cutlist until you confirm it. ### Install the Extension You only do this once. 1. Download the Cutlist Evolution extension (a `.rbz` file). Hosting for the download is coming soon. 2. In SketchUp, choose **Window → Extension Manager → Install Extension**, and pick the `.rbz`. 3. Accept the unsigned extension prompt if SketchUp shows one. 4. The extension appears at **Extensions → Cutlist Evolution → Send to Cutlist Evolution**. SketchUp 2021 or newer is required, on Windows or macOS. ### Sending a Model 1. Open the **Import SketchUp** tab. It shows a connection code. 2. In SketchUp, choose **Extensions → Cutlist Evolution → Send to Cutlist Evolution**. 3. Paste the code into **Connection code**. 4. Pick the unit you work in from the SketchUp dialog's own list. The extension converts before it sends, so the numbers arrive ready to cut and nothing is converted again at this end. 5. Set **Send** to **Whole model** or **Selection only**. 6. Press **Send**. 7. The parts appear in a table and a 3D preview, with the same columns, roles and controls as the **Import Model** tab. Edit any value, remove any row you don't want, then press **Import** - or **Discard** to throw the whole delivery away. ### Grouping by Assembly The extension tells Cutlist Evolution which component or group each part came from, so parts you drew together can be cut together. Tick **Group parts by assembly** and each assembly becomes a [group](/guide/#groups) - a block of parts cut in the arrangement you drew them in, keeping grain and pattern running continuously across the joins. Groups appear in the **Groups** panel, where you can adjust or remove them. The option appears when the delivery describes assemblies at all, and is off by default. An assembly is only grouped when its parts: - share a **material** and a **thickness** - the block is cut from one board - lie in **one flat face**, rather than at angles to each other or stacked in layers - so a run of doors or a veneered front groups, while a cabinet's sides, shelves and back don't - are all the **same way round** - group positions can't turn a part - don't **overlap** where they were drawn. Anything else imports loose, with a notice naming the assembly and the reason - **Cabinet B not grouped: mixed materials**. ### Notes - Codes expire after about 15 minutes, and the same code keeps working until then - so you can send, adjust the model, and send again without re-pairing. Use **New code** if yours has expired or you want to cut off a previous pairing. - Your model's parts should be groups or components. A component holding other components is walked into, contributing its sides, top and shelves rather than itself as one large board. - Dimensions are read from each component's own axes, so a rotated part measures the same as an unrotated one. - Hidden components are left out. - Fractions are shown when the number format is set to fractions. That is a display setting and does not change any measurement. - The sender decides whether a delivery replaces the parts already in your cutlist, and the panel tells you which it will do before you import.