If you are just starting with 360 product photography, we often recommend to play with something simple like this DIY turntable or a similar "lazy susan" platform. Heck even a cake stand would do as a proof of concept. We shot hundreds of products for our commercial clients using that DIY table in the link so it works! Or you can get one of the many automated display stands on eBay that we see some folks re-sell for x2 the price as "360 product photography" turntables elsewhere (ha, right!).
The multi-row photography like the JVC example by Flipside Studios on our home page (click the 3D button there) is quite more involved though. The trick is to turn your camera around a product vertically in desired increments after completing each set (or row) of our usual 360-degree images.
[June 1, 2020] Check out this recent post on two-row 360 product photography that can be easier to implement.
So we recently solicited a couple of studio images from Richard George (Richard K. George Photography) who tested our original idea of a DIY multi-row 3d setup with some success:
Note the protractor at the end of the horizontal arm that holds the camera rig. The arm can spin inside the brackets producing the needed circular camera motion, and the fixed protractor is used to measure the angle increments.
This could be a good starting point if you want to test the waters with the 3d product photography. And once you get a feel for it and may be get a bigger project to shoot, you may consider professional equipment which often costs many thousands of dollars for similar functionality (ping us for referrals).
[June 1, 2020] an interesting approach you may also consider utilizes a vertical rail system with multiple cameras fixed to the railing, producing pretty much the same result. See this link with one such implementation at the Museum of African American History in Boston. While it may appear that this setup is quite more expensive, the time savings and consistency this should allow for is priceless.
WebRotate 360 Product Viewer has full support for the multi-row spherical and hemispherical photography with some advanced fine-grain control. To test the features, download our software here as well as this set of sample multi-row images (7 rows x 36 images) that were rendered in 3d modeling software and review these related posts:
First v3.6 Beta Release. Now With Full 3D Product Views
Download New v3.6 Beta Release (Build 3.6.0.542)
v3.6.2 Beta Released. Now with Incremental Zoom and More