Here’s an another interesting find – a gallery of studio images from the hemispherical 3D photo-shoot by Almont Green at the museum of African American History in Boston. Just click on the image above to see all of the awesome details at his improvised studio. You see, the hemispherical multi-row photography is a much trickier process than our standard 360 degree spins that you would usually see on the ecommerce websites. And shooting multi-row photography for a major museum is even more challenging since the items cannot be removed from the site and the setup has to be built right there at the museum. Not to mention the responsibility of having to move these items back and forth..

In this great example, Almont approached the problem by building his custom photo rig with multiple cameras attached to a curvy poll as well as a manual 360-degree turntable. The system captures what we think is 8 rows of 360 degree images (by the number of attached cameras) and each row seems to be composed of 36 images total, judging by the manual markings on the custom made turntable that you see in some of the photos.

So each individual camera is fixed at its precise angle that was calibrated using the center of the turntable and the hanging weight. Then all of the cameras are triggered (hopefully at once) to capture 8 rows of images for each step of the turntable. The rig looks very light and well-built and seems quite portable. I’m still wondering whether the continuous lights used hot halogen bulbs or the cool daylight ones as there’s a lot of them there and and it can make the work quite uncomfortable if it’s the hot bulbs.

Also note how Almont arranged the two rows of lights on each stand where one row just shoots straight at the background and the other lights up the object – this is a really portable setup unlike what we used here for shooting on location with a bunch of soft boxes which is a pain!

All in all this is a masterful execution. The only thing we could recommend would be automating the manual rotation with one of professional robotic 360 photography turntables as they can save a lot of time even with the nice assembly that Almont had in this setup.

Nov 07, 2017 - New BigCommerce integration v2.8 for Stencil based themes has been released. To learn more, visit this page.

BigCommerce users, rejoice! WebRotate 360 Product Viewer for BigCommerce Beta (DEMO) is now available for download. Best of all, it's free and all your 360 product images (and the rest of the integration files) can be hosted via your own BigCommerce file storage that comes with your BigCommerce plan. Please find the installation instructions and our beta download package below:

1. Upload

Download this beta package, unzip, and then upload webrotate360 folder via your BigCommerce FTP under the content folder that you will find in the root of your FTP (you can get your BigCommerce FTP details under Settings->File Access->FTP in the BigCommerce Admin).

2. Edit styles

Sign into your BigCommerce Admin and navigate to Design->Template Files. Expand Styles section and open styles.css in the Edit mode and paste the following to the bottom of the css file and save (you can use your own styles for #wr360WrapperId, change viewer width and height, add borders, etc):

/* WebRotate 360 Config
....................................................................... */

#wr360WrapperId{
    width: 400px;
    height: 300px;
    margin: 10px 0 30px 0;
    border: 1px solid #F4F4F4;
}

.ProductAside .ProductThumbWrap{
    display: none;
}

div#fancy_outer{
    z-index: 50099 !important;
}

div#fancy_overlay{
    z-index: 50098 !important;
}

3. Edit Product Details template

Go back to Design->Template Files, expand Panels and open ProductDetails.html in the Edit mode. Paste the following to the bottom of the file and save:

<link type="text/css" href="/content/webrotate360/imagerotator/html/css/basic.css" rel="stylesheet"/>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/content/webrotate360/imagerotator/html/js/imagerotator.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/content/webrotate360/wr360hook.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">

jQuery(document).ready(function() {
    WR360Initialize();
});  

</script>

4. Configure test product

Open a test product for edit in BigCommerce Admin (Products->View Products) and navigate to the Custom Fields tab. Create a new custom field and call it config_file_url. Add the following as a test value: /content/webrotate360/360_assets/sampleshoe/config.xml

Navigate to the product page in your webstore and you should see a 360 product spin of a sample shoe in place of the main product image (similar to this one - http://bigcommerce.360-product-views.com/sodling-black-leather-duffle-bag/).

5. Add your own 360 spins

If you haven't created 360 views with WebRotate 360 Product Viewer before, you will need to download our free 360 photography software and follow this simple YouTube video guide to create your 360 degree product view first.

Upload published 360 spins (only those folders that were created by the software under the 360_assets folder) via BigCommerce FTP under contents/webrotate360/360_assets and note the location of the xml configuration file(s) located in the uploaded folder(s). Then just create a custom product field for each product with a 360 view as per above instructions and paste relative xml path into the custom field value and save the changes.

Here's how your FTP folder structure may look like:

<BigCommerce root FTP>
  |
  --> content
      |
      --> webrotate360
           |
           --> 360_assets
               |
               --> <product1 folder>
               |    |
               |    --> <product1 images folder>
               |    --> <product1 config file>.xml
               |
               --> <product2 folder>
               |    |
               |    --> <product2 images folder>
               |    --> <product2 config file>.xml
               ...

Download BigCommerce Integration and please let us know if any issues!

For those folks who are using our 360 product viewer for ‪‎OpenCart‬, as promised we have now included vQmod support into the viewer installation package. No more manual mangling with the core OpenCart files!

Readme instructions as well as the documentation notes on our OpenCart extension page (linked below) have been updated as well to reflect the new option.

Read more and download here:

http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension%2Fextension%2Finfo&extension_id=11377

Did you know that you don’t always need a 360 photography turntable to photograph an object or a product in 360 degrees? This time we came across a recent article on core77.com about a different 360 photography technique used by photographer Eric Pare of Montreal, Canada. Eric experiments with the hybrid-light photo painting and motion-stop photography mixed with “bullet-light” technique to capture 360 photos in an awesomely unique way.

He has tough requirements in that he shoots 360 views of dancing people while capturing their movements from various angles to create an immerse artistic presentation of the dance in 360 degrees. So Pare’s solution is a custom rig made of 24 DSLR cameras that he arranged on a circular frame surrounding the dancers. Take a look at the video below:

While it works well for capturing action animations, Eric’s technique is not very suitable for 360 product photography as it’s a fixed setup both in terms of camera position, lighting, background, the number of 360-degree frames, etc., not to mention it can be quite expensive to build. Though we think this concept has a lot of potential when applied to 360 photography of large objects such as cars, furniture, large industrial machinery and similar products where the cost of building a custom rotating platform (if possible at all!) would be prohibiting.

Keep this technique in mind when approaching you next 360 photography assignments and if you get a chance to build something of this scale and complexity, let’s get in touch and share your experience on our blog!