Grain Alignment Across Panels
When you’re building cabinets, wardrobes, or fitted furniture, grain alignment is a design choice that depends entirely on the look you’re aiming for. While many jobs work perfectly well without it, there are cases where aligning the grain across doors, drawer fronts, or panels helps the finished piece read as a single, intentional unit.
Grain Alignment in MaxCut is designed to support those situations; giving you control over how visually related parts are laid out and cut from the sheet material.
How Grain Alignment Works in MaxCut
MaxCut’s Grain Matching feature allows you to group related parts together during optimisation, so they’re cut from the same area of the sheet.
Rather than treating each panel independently, MaxCut can keep selected parts close to one another, helping maintain a consistent grain appearance across components that will be seen together.
You can:
- Group visually related parts so MaxCut nests them together on the sheet
- Align drawer fronts, doors, or panels to maintain a consistent grain pattern
- Keep connected parts from being scattered across different areas of the sheet
For example, you can group three vertical drawer fronts and cut them together so the grain flows consistently across all three once installed. This makes it easier to achieve a deliberate, visually balanced result when grain continuity is part of the design intent.
When Grain Matching Makes Sense
Grain Matching is most useful when visual continuity is a conscious part of the job, rather than something to manage after cutting.
Typical use cases include:
- Drawer fronts that sit side-by-side or in vertical stacks
- Cabinet doors designed to align across a run
- Wardrobe panels intended to share a continuous vertical grain
On jobs where grain alignment isn’t important, the feature can simply be left unused.
Grain Matching in Community vs Business Edition
Grain Matching is available in both editions of MaxCut, with different levels of control.
Community Edition
In the Community Edition, you can create one grain match group per job. This is suitable for simple layouts or jobs where only a single set of panels needs aligned grain.
Business Edition
In the Business Edition, you can create multiple grain match groups within the same job. This allows you to independently control grain alignment for different sets of parts—such as multiple drawer stacks, cabinet runs, or panel groups—within a single optimisation.
This flexibility is especially useful on larger or more complex projects where you need visual consistency across multiple areas.
To see more about how Grain Matching works, click here.
MaxCut is more than a powerful panel optimiser. By utilising advanced algorithms, in a matter of seconds, it works out precisely the amount of materials, the cost analysis, job breakdown and produces all the paperwork you need to successfully make and sell your job. Subscribe now to the Business Edition to get the most for your cabinetry business!