Announcement: Product Variants Is Here!

Discussion in 'Official Announcements' started by katkinkead, Aug 31, 2016.

  1. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    Great news for anyone with a data cap on their internet connection - view twelve such shop offers on your smartphone and see speed drop from LTE to GSM or worse for the rest of the month...
     
    StephanFriedrich likes this.
  2. I have found another glitch. When first selecting a model, materials that should be hidden are shown as available. Clicking on one of these materials then selects the correct scale for that material. From then on the materials are hidden in the correct way, but this is an inconsistency that could cause confusion and frustration.
     
  3. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    Tried it today and it absolutely does not work. I guess the development team didn't bother to try it out with 48 MB files. :)

    When I try it I get stuck here:
    Cannot get past this step even after processing for several hours.png

    I've tried redoing this step numerous times and each time letting it process for several hours. It just plainly will not load the file information. And then, if I try to save I get this:


    Locks up browser with the screen captured URL.png
    It just locks up the browser here with nothing showing but this URL. The browser is not locked up, it is still useable, but this is all that comes up after clicking the save button.
    I'll bet this would work if Shapeways simply invested in faster servers. :D
     
  4. woody64
    woody64 Well-Known Member
    Today I tried to adapt my editing help tool to the latest changes. Due to variants there were some significant changes in how paths are generated.

    It seems that the old model-id remained in https://www.shapeways.com/model/upload-and-buy/<modelid>
    Whereas the products were newly generated out of the old sales side of the model:
    https://www.shapeways.com/product/edit/<product-id>

    In the pricing csv you only can see the <product-id> but you don't see the model.
    I have only checked it in the case of using different models for different materials. That is not visible there (correct?)

    Woody64
    (I have used this table to auto generate links to the different sections which makes my life easier when doing some mass changes)
     
  5. MrNibbles
    MrNibbles Well-Known Member
    So I made a procedural boo-boo. I added three products to a variant size product, small, medium, and large. They all needed a pose re-orientation prior to adding to the variant but unfortunately I only re-oriented the large size pose prior to creating the variant. So now small and medium have the wrong orientation and the large has the correct orientation.

    How do I get all the pose orientations to match after creating a variant? I tried correcting the poses of the source models afterwards but that did not do the trick. Must the problematic models be removed and added again to fix such a problem?

    https://www.shapeways.com/product/DW62C625P/10-node-complete-graph-planar-ornament
     
  6. MrNibbles
    MrNibbles Well-Known Member
    ^^^ As for above I seem to have solved the problem, although I'm not sure what I did. I did some merging which didn't seem to fix things, and then I re-oriented all the models, changed some material selections as they seemed stuck, and then after a while everything is correct in the variant. So many mysteries! I have no clue what is supposed to be coupled between the source models and the variant.
     
  7. Likesyrup
    Likesyrup Member

    This is absolutely imperative that you guys address this. I somehow lost some variants on a few things and now it's going to take me hours to do the pricing again
     
    woody64 likes this.
  8. woody64
    woody64 Well-Known Member
    Yes especially for the precious material adding the markup is a lot of work.
    Would also prefer to have additionally the possibility to add percentages.
    (Especially as I can remember the discussion in the forum on that long ago which causes markups as preferred option which was raised by some but never checked against the majority of designers)
     
  9. MrNibbles
    MrNibbles Well-Known Member
    Well that Disney droid store is interesting. It looks like it has variants AND sets AND customization enabled and it's running on a non-Shapeways web address probably linked through the API, although the products are addressed with a key so there must be a Disney Shapeways "store" with the inventory set as for sale but not public.

    Are there plans to open this method for general use so each shop owner can host a store on their own web site? (I don't have a web site of my own so I'm asking for other people who have requested this type of thing in the past.)
     
  10. MrNibbles
    MrNibbles Well-Known Member
    ^^^
    Actually they aren't using sets so much as an additional hierarchy layer plus variant (with base or no base), so it's a little more multi-dimensional than just having a single class of variant. At this point the sets thing is simulated by pointing to different models that comprise sets with everything being fabbed in one material process only.
    dis_variants.jpg




    If you look at an actual droid model page on Shapeways you can see that these are still limited by a simple variant approach. But also look at the variant names. New variant types have been defined beyond the original ones such as size.

    custom_variants.jpg


    And although the Disney page has the customization capability for text they have an older version that does not allow specials character entry like you now have within the normal Shapeways environment. On the other hand Disney gets the ability to prepend a character string to what the user adds and that does have special character capability. For example if you customize the R2 type droid the system auto prepends "R2-" with the hyphen, and the user gets to add 2 alphanumeric characters to the end of it. Alphabetical characters are also forced to be upper case only for customization which alleviates the problem of having font sizes changing when using lower case letters with dangling bottoms.

    Kind of interesting since it gives a sense of what things may be available to shops here in the future.
     
  11. robs_mw
    robs_mw Well-Known Member
    I was just browsing today, came across https://www.shapeways.com/product/H...-caterpillar?optionId=61521741&li=marketplace and noticed weird behaviour showing all kind of different prices whenever I select another scale or material which are not reflected in the price shown above the Buy now button (after selection!). Also the price shown above that Button is often not listed in the material section (anymore?). Even the material dropdown box changes (with the same scale selected...)

    Bottom line is the price shown above the Buy now button is not in sync with the prices shown in the material dropdown; even after selecting a material, the price above the Buy now button doesn't reflect the material price selected. Also in different browsers I see different prices listed (at the same time!) for the same scale/material selection...

    All very confusing for a customer. Maybe caching plays a role, but should that be something I should worry about?
    See attached some screenshots. I used different browsers and did refresh of the page many times.

    Capture2.JPG Capture4.JPG Capture5.JPG Capture6.JPG
     
  12. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    I think (part of) what is happening is that the prices shown in the material dropdown are not updated when you switch scales, so they depend on which scale you had selected previously. (The price displayed above the "buy now" appears to be what ends up in the cart and appears to be at least plausible for the combinations of size and material i tried)
     
  13. boxthoughts
    boxthoughts Member
    Does anyone know if it is possible to make a photo show up for all variants of a particular material? For example I have a photo of a polished silver ring and I want it to show up for all the different ring sizes that are polished silver. I only seem to be able to have it show for a particular size or every time if I choose 'Multiple Options Shown' which won't work either because I don't want it shown for bronze or other materials.
     
  14. MrNibbles
    MrNibbles Well-Known Member
    And another question... Is there any way to set secondary default materials for variants? For example let's say I have a large variant set as the size default with the default material of black porcelain. In addition to large there's also a small variant but it's to small to be offered porcelain so porcelain is turned off for the small size. What determines what the default material will be for this small variant? Is there an internal priority list for secondary (and tertiary and beyond) default materials? And if such a small variant can be set to a specific default material how would that be done?
     
    jceddy likes this.
  15. And another question / suggestion concerning the scale variants:
    Would it be possible to let us choose a free scale? There are a lot of common and frequent scales already, but sometimes a special scale is needed. I would really like to use the scale variants but unless I can have ALL versions of a model in that system, it makes no sense.
     
  16. jceddy
    jceddy Member
    One thing I noticed is that you can set the default variant and the default material, but there doesn't seem to be a way to set a default material for each variant. For example, I have a model with a Coated Full-Color Sandstone default, but it also has a smaller variant that I'd like to have default to Stainless Steel, but currently defaults to White Strong and Flexible (the "default" default?), since there's no way to set a default specific to a variant.
     
  17. Bathsheba
    Bathsheba Well-Known Member
    Yes this is needed. Maybe it needs its own thread? I've mentioned it before and got no response.
     
  18. jceddy
    jceddy Member
    It also looks like you lose a lot of customization options once Variants are added...this is kind of a pain as it means I have to have separate entries in the shop for anything that is customizable (beyond the built-in Shapeways "add text/image").
     
  19. MichaelAtOz
    MichaelAtOz Well-Known Member
    Anyone having issue with the limited width of the model/product names see this
     
  20. Brad_S
    Brad_S Member
    I am having some difficulty bulk editing the model files. With 10 ring sizes and 12 material, it gives 120 combinations, and it takes way too many clicks to set up the model files. I would like to be able to set the model file for a given ring size for all materials in one step. The only way I can see to bulk edit the model files is to click the checkbox at the top, which selects all the model files, and then uncheck over a hundred of the ones that I don’t want to edit. The problem is, there are so many clicks required, that it is not worth it. It is shorter to select every model file for every material, but that is also very tedious. I feel I might be missing the proper way to do it, so let me know if there is a better way.

    It would be great if we could select all the materials of one ring size, then set the model file for that ring size. Alternatively, but not as good, you could make the select all button toggle between selecting all and none. Then, we could select the check boxes we want with somewhat fewer clicks.

    Another idea is to allow a scale factor of our choice to be applied to the base model file to create the variants. That is actually how I made all of my model files for different sizes, so it would be cool to use just one or two base files with variable scaling.

    One more suggestion I have is to add CVS support for this variant feature so we can set it all up in Excel and then upload it.

    Thanks!
    Brad