3D product configurator for made-to-order quotes

If you sell made-to-order goods and want a 3D product configurator, the version that stays accurate is the one drawn from the same sizes and features that produced the price. A picture built separately goes stale the day the range changes, and a customer will measure off it. The first thing to check is whether the picture changes when a dimension on the quote changes.

Here is how that looked at one fabricator, and what it took.

You make stainless steel counters, work tables and cooking ranges to order. Every one is different. The customer receives a quotation with a price and a written description, and is left to imagine what they are buying: two undershelves, a splashback, four legs, a sink bowl of a particular size.

That gap is where orders go wrong. A customer who pictures one thing while you build another does not find out until the item arrives, and then it is a dispute about a made-to-order piece that cannot simply go back on a shelf.

The odd part is that the quoting system already knew the exact shape of the item. The estimator had typed the length, breadth and height. The system had added up the cost of each shelf, leg and bowl to reach the price. It was drawing none of it.

What was actually going on

The shape was already in the system, because the price was worked out from it. The only missing piece was a way to turn those same figures into a picture.

The CAD drawings could not do it. They are flat, marked not to scale, and drawn as raw lines with no reusable parts. So the picture had to come from the place the price came from: the dimensions and features on the quote line.

Two other routes were considered and rejected. A photorealistic rendering needs an artist to build a model for every product, and again whenever the catalogue changes. It would show the item as the artist built it, not as this customer ordered it. A generated image was worse. It is not three-dimensional and not accurate to the dimensions, and a picture that is only approximately the item is worse than no picture, because a customer will measure off it.

What we changed

The preview is now built in the browser from the saved quote line, every time somebody opens it. It is made of simple boxes and cylinders, sized from the real dimensions, with surfaces that read as brushed steel, glass or painted cast. We chose stylised over photographic on purpose. It is honest about what it is, it is exactly to scale, and it costs nothing per product beyond the rules.

Nothing is stored. Change a dimension and the picture changes, because it has no life of its own. It cannot drift out of step with the quote it claims to show.

The rules are written once for families of products, not once per product. A service counter, a work table, a rack, a cooking range, a trolley and a cabinet each have one layout that says where things go. Fifty-odd product types collapse to a handful of layouts, and the counter family alone, six or seven products with near-identical structure, is covered by a single one. Each feature, such as a splashback, has one rule for how to draw it, which does not care what it is attached to.

The rules are matched on each feature’s code, not its name. Names are editable, and the day somebody renames a feature to be clearer, the picture would quietly stop drawing it. Every feature and variant in the catalogue turned out to have a code, which is what made that choice available.

A feature with no drawing rule is simply left out, rather than breaking the picture. That is what let us ship before every case was solved. Of 24 features on the most complex product, around 14 draw faithfully and a couple are approximated. The rest, such as a curved dome cover and some burner assemblies, need curved shapes or a hand-built model, and they are genuinely hard.

What it did not fix

A preview can be quietly incomplete. A customer looking at a product with a missing feature sees a picture without it and has no way to know. So each feature carries a tag saying whether it is drawn fully, approximately or not at all, rather than leaving the viewer to notice.

The pricing side could not supply the layout. It knows what features an item has and what each costs, but nothing about where anything sits. That knowledge had to be written from scratch, family by family.

The 3D viewer is also a heavy piece of software, roughly 280 KB compressed. It is loaded only when somebody opens a preview, so the rest of the application is unaffected.

What to check before you choose

Ask what your quote already knows. If the figures that produced the price also describe the shape, you may be able to draw the shape from them, and you will never have to keep a second record in step.

1. Is a picture commissioned per product, so it goes stale when the range changes?
2. Would the picture survive someone renaming a feature?
3. Does a customer ever measure off what you show them? If so, only an exact-to-scale picture is safe to send.
4. Does the picture say which features it leaves out, or does it stay quietly incomplete?

Where this ends up

That preview is part of Quote, the quoting product this was built for. The dimensions and features already sitting on the line are its only inputs, and the picture is drawn when somebody opens it rather than stored against the quotation.