360 degree photography - HOWTO?

[appiah4]

Does anyone know of an easy way to take rotating 360 degree animated photographs of miniatures like the ones GW have on their site?  I was thinking of manually rotating the miniture and shooting from the same angle, then adding them into a GIF maker, but I'm not sure how many degrees I should rotate by per shot.  30 degrees sounds OK?  Anyone know how GW make theirs?

[Gurth]

The way I’d probably do it would be to put the model dead centre on some kind of turntable, take a picture, rotate by a certain amount, take another photo, repeat until done.

 

How far to rotate between shots would depend on the speed with which you want to be able to “rotate” the image, I’d say: the slower, the more photos you need, and thus the smaller the rotation between pictures.

 

Also, I wouldn’t create animated GIFs. GIF has a very limited colour palette (a maximum of 256 colours) which means the photos are rather likely to not look very good unless the image is greyscale, and second, GIF compression doesn’t work well for photo-like images, meaning you’ll get a huge file compared to the same image as a JPEG. Better ways would be to either use separate photos and display them one at a time, or to put all photos together into a strip and display only one at a time, in both cases loading the next one when the user clicks or after a certain amount of time, depending on what you want. You could also use a movie editor to display them as still frames which you can then save as a movie. The best way rather depends on the way in which you want to display these images to people, though.

[Lucien Eilam]

GW use 36 images, so 10 degrees, and JavaScript to animate them. The more images you have, the smoother the effect will be, but the more people will have to download. There are commercial solutions that automate the whole process.

 

For a homemade solution, you probably need a turntable (marked up so you can easily position it) and a tripod to keep everything perfectly lined up from one shot to the next. 

[Ultrad81]

I've used stop-frame animation software for something similar, which worked pretty well.  Something like I Can Animate is fairly cheap and would do the trick if you want a movie file at the end.

 

Alternatively, for an all-in-one solution there look to be plenty of stop-frame apps available for mobile devices, although you'd still need some way of holding the tablet/phone still to take the photos (and obviously have a half-decent camera fitted).