Happy to announce that WebRotate 360 Product Viewer for OpenCart has been updated to work nicely with the final release of v3.5. This update also adds a couple of handy extras:

Responsive height

With our previous releases of the OpenCart integration, you could easily make your 360 product spins integrate seamlessly with responsive OpenCart themes by setting the viewer width to a relative number (e.g. 100%) in the module settings. This worked fine with just one exception common to most CSS layouts - the height of an element inside a responsive layout can't simply scale relative to its width without extra javascript handling. We had a solution to this issue in the core product for a while now, but the OpenCart integration was still lagging behind. Not anymore!

Using our new module setting called Responsive Base Width you can specify the original / default width of your 360 product views in OpenCart which will force viewer to scale its height responsively and relative to the current viewer width. Think of the base width as the default 360 product viewer width in pixel that you expect your visitors to see when your responsive theme is not scaled to fit a smaller screen size. This is usually the width of the 360 view images that you would set under the Interface tab in SpotEditor.

Viewer Skins

v3.5 release of WebRotate 360's core product introduced a couple of extra \skins as well as the "empty" skin for your advanced customizations (a bit more on this can be found here). Changing the skins with our previous version of the OpenCart integration was complicated and required modifications in the module. Now with the latest OpenCart update you can simply turn on any of the built-in skins that come with the core product via the Viewer Skin drop-down in the module settings and that's it!

Version 1.3 of the OpenCart integration for WebRotate 360 Product Viewer is now live and can be downloaded here.

NOTE: If you are migrating to the recently released OpenCart v2, we have a working plugin for it as well. It will be posted online asap, and it's available now upon request .

Did you know that we added three new 360 product viewer skins and a bunch of new hotspot indicator shapes in v3.5?

Even though this release was not about flashy graphics and such (read more), we managed to sneak in these colorful hotspot indicator shapes, plus two new toolbar skins (round, retina) and an empty skin for your API needs as well.

The Retina skin was specifically designed for 360 product viewing on mobile devices with high resolution screens. It looks equally sharp on desktop monitors or the new iPads with retina display & other high-res smartphones and tablets. Here's a screenshot of the skin:

More skins are in works and we have some cool new ideas for extra hotspot indicators too.

Remember, you can always add your own graphics for the hotspot indicators that can be anything you like (i.e., text, bullets, arrows, etc..) and, of course, you can easily customize the existing skins or add new ones as it's all in CSS. With the recent addition of our API you can go completely wild on how you present your 360 product viewer controls and the new empty skin, we hope, should help with that!

DOWNLOAD

If you haven't heard, the final release of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3.5 is out. You may download it here and also please check out our updated user guide. And if you have purchased our PRO license before, email to support at webrotate360 dot com for the commercial download of the software.

These days we're busy updating all of our plugins and add-ins to run the latest and greatest and this includes making sure the v3.5 script is bundled with all of our plugins, adding latest features and fixes and also testing on the latest platform releases. So today this post is about our WordPress integration which was updated just a couple of days ago so now we can proudly acknowledge that WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3.5 is supported in the brand-new WordPress 4 released earlier this month.

In addition to updating scripts and css, we made sure there're no conflicts with the new default WP 4 theme. Also, as we reported here before, our WordPress integration is now fully responsive in the embedded mode with the addition of the basewidth short-code parameter.

PS: next update will see our new support for all of the recent 360 viewer skins which for now requires a manual change in the plugin file (i.e replacing word basic with either thin, retina, round or empty in the three places in webrotate360.php that can be found under the webrotate-360-product-viewer plugin folder).

Here at WebRotate 360 we are always on the lookout for useful 360 photography resources. And today, thanks to the product photographer Frank Bekker at Amorphium Imaging based in South Africa, this is a short video that Amorphium Imaging just shared on Youtube to demo their neat 360 product photography workflow and setup!

In addition to the 360 product spins, Frank also does a few still shots to produce a complete set of images for each product – all using the same equipment and software.

We will take an educated guess here and suggest that the 360 product photography turntable shown in the video is perhaps one of the larger ones of the Ortery’s PhotoCapture 360 series. Most likely, it’s PhotoCapture 360M with an extended platform to allow for larger items but it could be an L or XL model as well.

PhotoCapture turntables come with their own control software that you can see at work in the video. It automatically synchronizes your camera and the turntable with a lot of handy option such as live preview, ability to re-shoot and refocus on a given shot, set most of you camera settings for your current lighting conditions and a lot more.