Making Your Own Turntables for Shooting QTVR Object Movies

Multiple row QTVR object movies allow you to show an object at a number of vertical angles, as well as rotating them horizontally. Such object movies require the ability to swing the camera around the object as well and rotate the object on a turntable. Because of its complexity, we will not be showing you how to build a rig with camera movement here. Such rigs may be purchased commercially from such companies as Kaidan and Peace River Studios.

Single row objects, that allow horizontal rotation of an object, but not vertical rotation, require only a turntable to shoot. Readily available items such as old record turntables or lazy susans will serve you well for shooting single row object movies, but designing and building your own turntable expressly for the purpose of creating single row QTVR object movies is fairly easy to do, and costs around $20-$30 in materials. We will show two designs for turntables here, which are comparable to Kaidan's low-cost PiXi turntable. These designs may give you your own ideas about how to make your own object rig.

The first design is what I call my "flower pot" turntable, because it uses an inverted flower pot for a pedestal. The second design is my lazy susan turntable, because it uses lazy susan hardware.

The "Flower Pot" Turntable

  1. First acquire the materials for the turntable. These were purchased at Builders Square (now defunct), but similar materials may be had at other hardware and gardening supply stores
  1. Find the center of the of the wooden base by drawing the diagonals of the square. Drill a hole the same diameter as the dowel rod at the intersection of the diagonals.
  2. Drill the same sized hole in the center of the plant caddie. A molding nipple in the exact center will help you locate where to drill.
  3. Cut the dowel rod to a length so it will fit into the hole in the wooden base and stick up enough to allow you to place the caddie securely on the rod, as shown above.
  4. Next, we will create an index on the rim of the plant caddie that shows where each 10-degree increment of rotation is, so that you can easy shoot 36 shots for a 360-degree QVTR object movie. Here we will use a tape-and-measure technique for finding the tick marks of the index. We use a protracter method for the lazy susan design. First, tape around the edge of the flower caddie.
  5. Cut across the tape at one point and peal it off the flower pot. Lay out the tape on a clean table surface and carefully measure its length in millimeters with a meter stick.or tape measure. (The English measuring system does not work well for this purpose.)

  1. You can use a spreadsheet such as Excel or Appleworks to calculate where all the evenly spaced tick marks go on your tape. In the first cell of the spreadsheet, put 1. In second cell of the first column (A) put in a formula for adding 1 to the value in the cell above. In both Excel and Appleworks the forumla =A1 + 1 will do this. Then highlight cells 2 through 36 in A and do a "Fill Down" command, found under the "Edit" menu in both programs. This will put a sequence of numbers, from 1 to 36 in column A.

  1. In the first cell of Column B put in a formula that mutiplies the value in cell A1 times the circumference of the flower pot caddie divided by 36 (A1*896/36).

  1. Highlight cells B1 through B36 and do a "Fill Down" command. You will get the measurements for placing all of your marks on the masking tape. Formating the numbers to show one or 0 decimals past the decimal point will make the numbers easier to interpret.

  1. Print out the spreadsheet and use it to help you draw the marks on the tape.

  1. Put the tape back on the flower pot caddie and use it to draw your index on the caddie. Number them from left to right.

  1. Drill a hole in the base near the edge of the flower pot caddie. Put a length of dowel rod or wire in the hole to work as an indicator.

You now have a QTVR Object turntable suitable for many objects. This basic design can easily be scaled up for larger turn tables.


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Lazy Susan Turntable