MakingLEGO Spin Table

About

I've sometimes seen nice image previews that let you rotate your view camera around a particular object, giving you a real 3D feel.

In my earlier days, I wrote 3D console games and so doing this with a 3D model is trivial. What is necessary for real-world objects, however, is to take photographs of the object at every position, and replay the appropriate one.

The equipment for doing this is expensive, so I built my own from LEGO and wrote a library to replay the images from an APNG file.

Example

Here's my LEGO Spin table, as photographed for my easySpin library.

See the spin table

See a Dalek

See a LEGO model

Creating Assets

To use the module, ensure your image is in APNG format, with the first frame representing the 0 degree image.

If you starting with a series of still images, you can convert them using ffmpeg with the command:

ffmpeg -framerate 1 -pattern_type glob -i '*.jpg'  -f apng -plays 0 -vf "scale=300:-1" output_file.png

I suggest resizing the image to keep the file size low.

Background

So, here's more information on converting to APNG.

And the underlying APNG library.

DIY

Here's a stand alone example for you to rip apart! Click for the easySpin example.

Download

The full source to the easySpin example