A method of partitioning a model to facilitate printing of the model on a 3D printer includes identifying partition sensitive locations on the model and creating a binary tree with a root note representative of the model. An iterative partitioning process is applied to divide the model into objects by selecting a node of the binary tree without any children nodes, identifying a portion of the model corresponding to the node, and determining candidate cutting planes on the portion of the model based on the partition sensitive locations. During the process, analytic hierarchical processing (AHP) is applied to select an optimal cutting plane from the candidate cutting planes based on partitioning criteria. The optimal cutting plane is used to segment the portion of the model into sub-portions, and two children nodes representative of these sub-portions are created on the node of the binary tree.