Three’s a trend! We’ve written about Makies Doll Factory, an app for creating dolls then getting them 3D-printed, and Blokify, an app for creating blocky toys and getting them 3D-printed. Now meet Monstermatic.

Released in the US only for now by Mico Studio, it’s an iPhone and iPad app that gets children to make virtual monsters, then – you guessed it – get them 3D-printed.

The app has 10 different monsters to make, swapping in different horns, hats, teeth, eyes and other parts to get them just so, before drawing whatever colourful design your child likes onto them.

In virtual form, the monsters can be played with in a similar style to the popular Talking Tom Cat apps, including speaking into the microphone to hear your words repeated by the monster. They also have a range of animations: “Watch your monster explode, shoot with a paintball gun, smash a guitar and break your screen,” as the App Store listing puts it.

The twist: the monsters can then be ordered as 3D-printed figurines – if 3D printing is new to you, it’s (to simplify wildly) like normal printing, except instead of 2D prints on paper, it’s 3D prints with plastics and other materials.

For now, the app is free, although there are costs for ordering the 3D-printed monsters. At the time of writing, the figurines cost $25.95 each, although we’ll stress again, for now this is only available in the US.

Anyway, we’re very interested in this trend for making digital things and then turning them into physical objects: we think children will love the idea too. And the costs will come down over time, as 3D printing gets more popular.

Monstermatic is a free download for iPhone and iPad from the US App Store. And if you want to know more about the company behind it’s plans, check out its campaign on Kickstarter last year, when it raised more than $30,000 to get the idea up and running.