manual nesting suggestions?

I have several 2d shapes that I need to nest on a sheet for laser
cutting. At the moment, I have the planer surface from each mated
coincident to the front plane of an assembly with a bounding box
representing the material sheet size minus kerf. The issue that I am having
is that translating the location (xy) is real easy. Controlling the
rotation of individual parts is a real pain. If you click on the rotate
component button the part kinda sorta slides around the screen and does not
seem to be rotating around any specific point. At the moment I am having to
set rotation angles through editing angular mates and it very slow progress.

I realize that there is automated nesting software available, but a human
being will beat the best software 99% of the time with a bit of time
investment. The material is quite costly and 15% savings adds up quite fast.

Is there a way to set the point that a part rotates about ( ie center of
mass ) in an assembly by default so that its not necessary to create, and
edit multiple times, mates for each part ( or instance thereof )? Am I
missing a setting option somewhere?

 

I do that in an assembly. I mate the cutouts to a plane and use the
pick and move capability of my spaceball to position everything. Just
like working a jigsaw puzzle.

 

Thanks that was the tip I needed. I had assumed that, when using the
"rotate about entity", the entity could not be within the same component
that I wanted to rotate. I was in the process of dropping in and mating up
30 cylinders that I could rotate about. I was obviously wrong, thanks again.