Rotating object stand. Please help

[littlefish]

Ok so I am a student worker at my college's library, I work in the archives and special collections office. We deal with many many old objects, restoring them and whatnot. My boss is currently working on a new website for the office, showing off the the many objects in the collection. I mainly work with a large flatbed scanner, helping to import the thousands and thousands of glass plate negatives we have. Recently my boss has taken up an interest in using a 3D immaging software of sorts to display some three dimensional objects. After some trial and error, my coworkers and I settled upon this system: jQuery Reel Plugin I'm not sure how it works as I am no computer scientist, I just take the pictures. If you go to the website (It takes a while to load) we are duplicating the setup they have there with the red formula one car. Just drag the picture left and right to rotate it. We have set up a large protractor and have place our object on top of that, rotating it 10 degrees each time, taking a total of 36 pictures to cover all 360 degrees.



Now for my question:
When we rotate the object by 10 degrees each time, there's no way to keep it exactly centered, causing it to move back and forth as you rotate it. We want to build a rig that we can place the object on, and have it rotate exactly 10 degrees each time. We were thinking something that functioned like a lazy susan or turntable the the ability to stop and exactly 10 degree increments. This would also allow us to not have to remove everything in the picture but the object,(we need the object on a pure white background and as long as we have it placed on the protractor, some photoshoping will be necessary to remove it from the picture) which can become very tedious for 36 pictures times however many objects we need to do here. Does something out there exist? Whether specific to photography or something homemade. I'm sure this is very confusing so thanks for your patience and help.
Regards,
Mike

[Jim Bryant]

use one of those rotating piano stools.

[IABoomer]

Depending on the size of the object and how precise your angular movement has to be, you could look into a rotary table. Something like this would let you crank out your angular move, and would be stable enough to probably build a bigger surface on if you needed to rotate items larger than the 6" diameter of the table.

Amazon.com: Grizzly H7527 6" Rotary Table w/ Div. Plates: Home…

[sk66]

This would be quite easy to build.
Two pieces of plywood mounted to a large heavy duty lazy susan bearing (ok, that one is huge, you could probably use one smaller/cheaper). Every 10* around the perimeter drill a hole to accept a pin (double headed nail?). You could use white melamine board instead of plywood... The boards could be left square.

If you do not want the holes/pin in the top of the table you could make a "drop edge" for the top and run the pin thru that into the side of the lower...You'd need to cut the top and bottom boards into circles for this method.

Your biggest issue will be in getting the object exactly centered initially.

[BigVinnie]

The Chinese Restaurant I go to has tables the the center rotates. Would work pretty good.

I would drill a hole every 10 degrees and stick in a dowel pin. Have a camera mount with a little spring loaded stop. Click, pull the stop and rotate, repeat.

Would not take much to automate that to do a full rotation. Motor, relay, switch, remote camera cord.

[Jim Bryant]

Originally Posted by BigVinnie

The Chinese Restaurant I go to has tables the the center rotates. Would work pretty good.

I would drill a hole every 10 degrees and stick in a dowel pin. Have a camera mount with a little spring loaded stop. Click, pull the stop and rotate, repeat.

Would not take much to automate that to do a full rotation. Motor, relay, switch, remote camera cord.

Hahahahahaha, BigVinnie I was just thinking of one of those. they are called Lazy Susan.

[Camdixon]

The others have answered your questions on how to build the table. As far as removing the protractor lines from the image that could be quite tedious. How about something that isn't really visible or easily visible. Like make the markings in light pencil and then drill the peg holes for a stop. That way camera would have a rough time picking up lines and you could stop at each position.

Also, if you really want to know how this works I can go really deep into this as I kinda worked on a project for my college similar to this. Although, I will spare you. Basically it works like a Cat Scan from a Hospital. They take a "slice" of the object and combine them all into a "map" which then they can show you as a movable 2D object on the screen (which simulates 3D).
The project my professors work on is in this type of simulation. Actually we take things you can't see inside of "Like ancient scrolls still rolled up" and we unroll them digitally so they can be translated yet preserved. Sorta reverse of what your project does, but same technology.