Materials with a directional pattern (wood grain, stripes, geometric patterns) cannot be nested any which way: if a part is rotated on the sheet, the pattern will run crosswise on the assembled product. That is why a part has a texture flag that locks its orientation.
How it actually works
Texture is a plain "Texture" checkbox in the part row: it is either on or off. There is no "vertical / horizontal" choice in the system — there are only two states.
- Texture on — the orientation is locked: the part X dimension goes along the sheet X, and Y along Y. In practice this means the pattern runs along the long side of the sheet — on a 2800×2070 sheet that is the 2800 side. The optimizer is not allowed to rotate the part by 90°.
- Texture off — the pattern does not matter (a plain material or a random texture), and the optimizer may rotate the part by 90° to pack the sheet more densely.
The flag is tied specifically to the X axis, not to the "long side": on a 600×500 part the long side is X, while on a 500×600 one it is already Y. Describing the direction through the long or short side is therefore incorrect.
Effect on nesting
Forbidding rotation lowers the sheet fill density — fewer parts fit than could otherwise. That is the price of a uniform pattern direction on the finished product. If the material is plain, removing the texture almost always saves material.
A side effect: with texture on, the part Y dimension input is limited by the sheet Y dimension — the part cannot be rotated anyway.
How to set or remove it
The texture of a new part is set by the material. Material settings have a «Default texture» checkbox with the hint «The texture new parts of this material are created with»: whatever it is set to is what every new part gets. Glass has no texture, so the checkbox is not shown there at all. On an individual part the texture is still removed or restored with the checkbox in the part row.
The texture flag itself is set on the catalogue goods and is stored per firm: if one firm marks a material as textureless, it stays unchanged for everyone else. A textured material carries a «Texture» mark in the order material list and in goods search. If no firm has set the flag, the behaviour is the old one — a new part is created with the texture on.
For a whole material at once there is a separate action, "Remove texture from parts": it clears the flag from every part of that material in one click. There is no reverse bulk operation to set the texture on all parts.
Marking on the drawing and in the nesting
On a part with texture on, three stripes along the X axis are drawn in the center of the drawing — they show at a glance that the orientation is locked, without opening the part settings. On the nesting card such a part is additionally marked with a double-headed arrow icon.