Creating Model Variations

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Model variations can be created after the “Parent” model has been created. For details on creating your first model see our Models 101 in the docs center.

Why Create Model Variations?

Having model variations can serve multiple purposes within 3D Print Force. We’ll touch on a few of them below.

Selling different versions of the same model.

Let’s use a 3D printed planter as an example. It would be common for a seller of that product to sell that in multiple sizes. Perhaps it’s a “small”, “medium”, “large” or maybe they give actual planter size dimensions such as “2.75”, or “3.50”.

Creating bundles

Maybe you want to offer a product as a single product but also as a pack of 5, or even pack of 10. Often times offering a product in a pack can be a great way to provide more value to customers as well increase your revenue. By spreading the cost of shipping across multiple products it allows you to reduce the price per item for the custom. It also increases the order value increasing your revenue per order.

Single item print vs. Full build plate

Printing a single item at a time vs printing multiple of that same at once has an effect on the product over all profitability. It has an even great effect on multi color models that do a lot of purging. By printing multiple at a time you save on both purge waste and print time.

No matter the reason you need variations what variations allow is for you to track your profitability in any selling scenario. Adjust the filament used, print time, other supplies needed, or shipping profile used for producing any of your variation scenarios and you will quickly be able to know exactly what the profitability is fore each version of the model you sell.

The original model created is technically your first “variation”. After the initial save you’ll be prompted with a “Create Variations” button.

In an effort to reduce user inputs the new variation will be created with many of the same model details as it’s parent model. Since this a variation most likely you’ll need to update things like print time, filament costs, etc.

In the above variation you can see we changed:

SKU* (needed for proper order tracking)

Model Name

Print Time (Large planter so it has a longer print time)

Filament Used (Larger planter so it uses more filament)

Shipping Supplies (Larger planter so it will ship in a larger box)

Updating Variation Model Pricing

After you create any number of variations for you model you can easily update the price you’ll charge for each one directly on the model details page.

We can see with are above planter example we would need to sell our 3.5” variation planter for $30.99 which is a $7.00 increase compared to our 2.75” planter. This increase ensures we have accounted for the increase in filament and printer time. As well as the increase shipping cost due to the larger package.

Model Variations Groupings

All variations of the same model are also grouped together on the “3D Model” table page. This allows for quick price adjustments and seeing all the profitability details of each model’s variation at a glance.

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* Make sure each model variation SKU is unique. These SKUs also should match the SKU used for the variation on any sales platform.