If you’re a 3D printing power user, you probably try to fit as many parts onto a single print job as possible. Most printing software has this built in to let you do that, but [Grégoire Passault] and his team thought they could do it better with their program Plater — it’s open source too.

They decided to make Plater after designing Spidey: an open-source 4-legged robot that makes use of 22 3D printed parts. The first few times they printed this took a long time because they had to manually arrange the parts — there had to be a better way!

Plater is a fairly simple program that lets you take in a bunch of STL files, set your print bed size and part spacing and then it creates an STL with as many parts in it as it can, organized on your print bed. Then you just have to load it up into your favorite slicing program and you’re good to go.

Seems like an excellent tool to add to your metaphorical 3D printing tool-belt!