Nesting maximum amount of shapes on a surface

Question

In industry, there is often a problem where you need to calculate the most efficient use of material, be it fabric, wood, metal etc. So the starting point is X amount of sha

Answer 1

You are referring to a well known computer science domain of packing, for which there are a variety of problems defined and research done, for both 2-dimnensional space as well as 3-dimensional space.

There is considerable material on the net available for the defined problems, but to find it you knid of have to know the name of the problem to search for.

Some packages might well adopt a heuristic appraoch (which I suspect they will) and some might go to the lengths of calculating all the possibilities to get the absolute right answer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packing_problem