Setting an attribute as variation in woo commerce via php [duplicate]

Question

This question is an exact duplicate of:

• How to get Woocommerce Variation ID? [closed]

I have a front-end form I am creating to allow users to publish a variable product to my shop from the front end with predefined attributes and variations.

I have found this very helpful question: here Which shows me how to set the product type as variable and assign my predefined attributes in the attributes section of the product data.

However when I am on the backend of Wordpress/Woocommerce and editing the product I click on variations and none are set, I look at the attributes and my "resolution" attribute is set with my 3 items.

How do I make this to where it will actually set those attributes to variations of my form? Do I need to use wp_insert_post? Looking in phpmyadmin it just looks like product variations are assigned to a parent_id (product id) and post type is product_varition and so on.

$new_post = array(
'post_title' => esc_attr(strip_tags($_POST['postTitle'])),
'post_content' => esc_attr(strip_tags($_POST['postContent'])),
'post_status' => 'publish',
'post_type' => 'product',
'tags_input' => array($tags)
);

$skuu = rand();
$post_id = wp_insert_post($new_post);
update_post_meta($post_id, '_sku', $skuu );

//my array for setting the attributes
$avail_attributes = array(
    'high-resolution',
    'medium-resolution',
    'low-resolution'
);

//Sets the attributes up to be used as variations but doesnt actually set them up as variations
wp_set_object_terms ($post_id, 'variable', 'product_type');
wp_set_object_terms( $post_id, $avail_attributes, 'pa_resolution' );


$thedata = array(
'pa_resolution'=> array(
                'name'=>'pa_resolution',
                'value'=>'',
                'is_visible' => '1',
                'is_variation' => '1',
                'is_taxonomy' => '1'
                )
);
update_post_meta( $post_id,'_product_attributes',$thedata);

update_post_meta( $post_id, '_visibility', 'search' );
update_post_meta( $post_id, '_stock_status', 'instock');

So just to be clear (I tend to be confusing) the above does create my variable product from the front end, and when I look at the product in the backend it is a variable product, it has the resolution attribute set and has my 3 terms (high-res, medium-res, low-res) as attributes. I just need to take this a step further where they are actually set as variations so people can place an order.