Do you know how many pictures are needed to create a three-dimensional, interactive product presentation? A minimum of 360 – put the model on a rotating rack and quickly take one picture for one degree of rotation. Better yet, set the camera for serial shooting, because the more photos, the smoother the animation. Want to see effect?

Although three-dimensional, interactive animations of products is best done with engineering project files in 3D modeling application (because it allows to obtain any number of shots and easy adjustments) but not always these files are available. If files are gone, then you may can creatively use… good old photograph. The method is more expensive, because it requires a lot of patience and considerably more work, but the results, in my humble opinion, are interesting. They can even be considered better than visualizations generated from the 3D modeling applications, because they look very natural. How is it done? First of all, you have to take care of lighting in the studio and eliminate shadows. Then we put the model on a rotating rack and quickly take pictures: one shot for one degree of rotation. Then simply write a little php script that displays the relevant series of such images, and voila – you’re done!

And one more thing 😉 – for professional look of 3D object we need remove backgrounds from pictures. So, we take a sit and remove backgrounds frame by frame, and for 450 photos we cry. Or… here is a tip: record macro sequence in Photoshop and go for a cup of tea when computer do whole work for you 🙂

If you wanna see effect go to my company website (sorry, in polish only) here.