In this post we will talk briefly about a project we did for Glock USA a couple of years ago when we were chosen to produce 360 product photography of pretty much all of Glock’s handguns.. This was an interesting and unusual assignment to say the least!

For one thing, there was no question about photographing guns in our own small studio. We had to find a couple of better options in downtown Los Angeles and Anaheim where we could meet with Glock’s team flying over all the way from Georgia and feel safe about photographing a small arsenal of firearms (Glock had to arrange with authorities for this first, of course).

Another challenge was to find a good way to photograph pistols of various sizes and weights in 360 degrees in a consistent manner and very quickly such that we could finish everything in 2-3 days.

On location – 360 product photography setup for Glock:

So the first task was to build a test setup to make sure everything would work on location which we did about a month in advance. And since we didn’t have access to the guns, we asked Glock to send us just a few magazines that would represent the majority of the items we were about to photograph. That was good enough to devise a simple approach:

Each magazine had a sturdy plastic base plate at the bottom that also had tiny rails for the actual magazine to slide in and out (you can almost see the rails in this image below). This base plate was stiff enough for us to drill in two holes and then mount it via small bolts onto an aluminum sheet that served as the base for all guns.

Magazine base plate:

This aluminum sheet was then itself attached to the turntable. We used the aluminum sheet such that we could easily drill wholes in it and then cut threads as well to firmly screw in the bolts which were coming out of the magazine plates. This was essential as some guns were small and others were quite long so the center of balance of the 360-degree rotation was different for various guns and extra holes had to be made quickly on site. We then wrapped the aluminum sheet with white tape to make sure there’s no glare and it could be easily removed during post production.

Plate assembly for balanced product rotation:

This worked very well as all we had to do for the majority of pistols was to slide in a new (empty!) magazine into the plastic magazine plate that was already screwed in to the aluminum sheet (and attached to the turntable) and then slide in the gun itself onto the magazine. That is until we had to change the magazine plate for a different model.

On location close-up:

The only small issue that remained was that these guns were quite heavy so there was a tilt on the barrel end and some smaller guns had an angled grip bottom which we compensated using a combination of washers going through the bolts between the magazine plate and the aluminum sheet as you can see better in these images:

Angle compensation with washers (example 1):

Everything had to be automated to make sure we finish the project on time so we used small Ortery PhotoCapture 360 as it was tough enough for all the items we photographed. The rest was pretty straightforward!

We have recently moved all posts from our old photogear360 blog here, so here's some related material you may find useful:

• 360 Product Photography of Long Narrow Objects
• 360 product photography upside down
• Using suspension in 360 product photography (example 1)
• Using suspension in 360 product photography (example 2)
• White background in your 360 product photography projects
• DIY guide to building a manual 360 product photography turntable
• 360 product photography of large objects
• Mastering 360 product photography
• 360 product photography of flashlights

We had a lot of great feedback on the first v3.6 beta release last month which helped improve v3.6 in a number of ways. If you haven't heard, v3.6 is all about full 3D / multi-row product views! So today we're making another release available with some of the feedback incorporated along with a couple of new features and enhancements:

Full image / row management under Images->Rows

The ability to add, remove and order images, have been on our feature request list since the first release of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer and became even more important in v3.6 with the introduction of full 3D product rotation via multiple image rows. This took some time to implement but at the end we really liked the flexibility of the new feature. New options are neatly arranged under the image list located on the Images -> Rows tab as you can see below:

The options are as follows:

• Add arbitrary number of new rows (note that the first row is always present in an empty project and can't be removed.
• Add new images to the end of the current row or immediately after currently selected image.
• Replace selected images with different images that you can pick from your hard-drive.
• Select all images in the currently selected row (can be helpful if you need to replace or remove all images in the row)
• Remove selected images from the current row (images will remain in your project's images folder just in case you will need them later)
• Move selected images up and down to reorder.

Note that there are also two extra controls next to the row drop-down which allow to add a single extra row or remove selected one accordingly.

Horizontal drag sensitivity in multi-row mode

It's called X-axis sensitivity for clarity as the vertical sensitivity control is also available (which is showing as Y-axis sensitivity in the latest release as per the image below). In short, it's a horizontal drag sensitivity and this means that if a mouse or touch moves a shorter distance (in pixel) than the X-axis sensitivity value, the images will not move horizontally. This can be useful for improving the stability of the vertical image drag such that the jumps between the image rows occur without accidental shifting of images horizontally. Row sensitivity works in the same way so you can now play with both values to achieve desired smoothness of your 3D product rotation depending on the number of rows and images in your project.

And as a reminder, the Drag speed factor setting that we had there before controls the number of times in a given second to check for the mouse or touch position (it's multiplied by Rotate period located on the same tab to give the value in milliseconds). So if we check for mouse or touch position every let's say 50 milliseconds (based on the configured values of Drag speed factor & Rotate period) and the X-axis sensitivity or Y-axis sensitivity threshold is reached as per above, we move the images accordingly. Note that when there's just a single row of images, both X-axis sensitivity and Y-axis sensitivity are disabled as the Drag factor & Rotation period are enough to control the drag speed of a single row.

Separate JPG quality control for High-res images (PRO)

There's an extra JPG image quality control for your zoom and full-screen images on the Publish form. This applies when you configure your 3D product views to contain two sets of images (i.e., small fitted images and high resolutions ones for zoom and full-screen) which is enabled via a check-box on the Publish form called "Created an extra set of fitted images".

Having a separate control of the JPG quality for your high resolution images can dramatically speed up full-screen and zoom loading times as often you don't really need supper high quality high-res images (e.g., compression artifacts are not that visible on large images). The high-res image rendering performance inside a browser window will also improve accordingly.

Skip image processing on publish & preview

As you can see in the image above, there's also a new setting on the Publish form called "Skip images and just process updated settings and hotspots". Now you can just check this box before hitting Publish or press F6 on your keyboard to just launch a browser preview after changing viewer settings that do not affect images (e.g., drag sensitivity, template update, hot-spot edits, etc).

In other words, it will not process and copy images again on publish when it's checked on the Publish form or when you hit F6 while making the edits. This saves a lot of time! Note that you would still need to do an initial full publish after creating a new project or at any time after you change viewer dimensions, high-res dimensions, image crop, image filters, path tools or watermarks, all of which affect image output.

Automatic software updates

Finally you can simply check for new product releases by going to the About form and selecting the new Check Updates button. It's also possible to configure the feature to check updates on every application launch via the check-box as shown below. So from now on, whether you have purchased a license or use the free version, you can get the latest an greatest without annoying email requests we required before.

New scalable loading progress indicator

Now is a good time for our old progress indicator to go. Being an animated GIF, it's not very mobile friendly which becomes more and more noticeable on the modern mobile devices with retina screens. Another complaint we've heard was that it looked too small in full-screen mode on large monitors. So we devised a cool new modern one that looks quite nice on tablets and phones. It can be styled in CSS with different colors, etc and is scaled automatically when in full-screen.

Image delays in animated GIF publishing

Our first v3.6 beta released featured new Images Delays that can be assigned under Images->Rows for each image to help creating interesting effects during product rotation without unnecessary image duplication. The same image delays will now propagate to animated GIF publishing as well, allowing for more creative animations with pauses on important frames, acceleration effects and similar.

iFrame management in HTML hotspots

With this relatively small update it's now possible to embed video and audio content via iFrame inside the hotspot rollovers when using HTML markup. Now we track iFrame elements inside the rollovers and remove them automatically when a rollover becomes hidden. Once user hovers over or clicks again on a hotspot indicator we re-add iFrames to their original position. Without this change, a playing video or audio embed (e.g., Youtube or SoundCloud) would still be playing when rollover becomes hidden which made this option not very useful in the previous releases.

New API setting for full-screen views

You can see a quick snippet below to give you a better idea of the new setting called configFileFullScreenURL. Use this setting to configure alternative view / xml config for the full-screen function, i.e., it will be loaded when user selects the full-screen button, if configured. This can be useful, if you need to show different hotspots, for example, or different images all together when viewer opens up in full-screen. When publishing separate product views to use in conjunction with this setting, please do not select “Create extra set of fitted images…” on the Publish form as fitted images are not needed in this case and this may break hotspot positioning.

jQuery("#wr360PlayerId").rotator({
     configFileURL: "your-viewer-config-xml-path.xml",
     configFileFullScreenURL: "your-full-screen-viewer-config-xml-path.xml"
});

DOWNLOAD

UPDATED on June 10, 2015. More new features and fixes:

• WebRotate 360 Product Viewer 3.6 Build 604
• WebRotate 360 Product Viewer 3.6 Build 127
• Full version history

PRO & Enterprise customers can either get the free download to play with the new beta features (you can still activate it with your spoteditor.code except for some of the image editing features) or request the commercial version of v3.6 Beta via support email (support at webrotate360 dot com), if you haven't received v3.6 beta download URL from us before which still works! From now on, you can just check and download new software updates as described in this blog post.

And if you need any help applying this update to any of WebRotate 360's plugins (i.e, WordPress, Joomla, PrestaShop, Magento, OpenCart, BigCommerce), please let us know and we would be happy to assist (it's just an FTP upload of a single published folder, i.e imagerotator).

Creative folks at N2Surplus of Roanoke, VA who specialize in selling new and used industrial parts online, shared a couple of cool pictures of their 360 product photography turntable they recently built for their ongoing photography projects.

The result of their creative thinking was this heavy-duty motorized turntable that was made out of recycled and dismantled parts they had available at their own warehouse.

Here is what it is made of:

• Turntable – bottom of a metal umbrella stand
• Box with motor – project / photography box out of a liquidation
• Plate with Casters – tray for a portable pump
• DC Permanent Magnet Motor
• DC Drive
• Speed Controller – off of a conveyor that they dismantled
• Wiring – off of the equipment they dismantled
• Outlet boxes & switches – off of the equipment they dismantled

We hope this example will inspire others to build something similar. These custom-built 360 product photography turntables can be fine-tuned to your exact requirements, not to mention their low cost comparing to specialized professional equipment.

And if you need heavy-duty parts for your next project, visit N2Surplus at www.n2surplus.com

Here is one of those cases where you can't say quickly if a 360 product view is a 3D CAD rendering or photography. This cool heart rate monitor by PulseOn (I'm really considering getting one!) looks almost like it was photographed but it's just a little bit too perfect for a shiny object like this..

Just click on the image and scroll down to the middle of the page where you will see the interactive 3D product view.

One important note: if you are using Firefox, you will see (at the time of writing) some odd image duplication as you spin 360-degree product images. This is because the images used in this product view are transparent PNGs (we're not sure why as PNG files usually are quite larger than JPG and the background here is a solid color so JPG images would work much better).

So when viewed in Firefox (or Opera), we have a configurable optimization for large image rendering designed specifically for Firefox that will result in this image duplication if the images are transparent. This optimization is on by default in our CMS and eCommerce plugins.

We also have a setting in most of our plugins to turn off this optimization as needed. In our WordPress integration, for example, this setting is located under the WebRotate 360 plugin settings as highlighted on this image:

Also, when you publish in SpotEditor, this setting is added into the published html template automatically to turn off the Firefox optimization if transparent PNGs are used (zIndexLayersOn = false).

PS: in most cases we do not recommend using PNGs, especially with transparency as the images are usually just too big and result in much slower loading and rendering inside a browser.