Setting up a turntable for a 360-degree render

When we render our sculptures, we need to make a decision about how we want to present our artwork. Sometimes, our goal is to make an artistic composition with a nice camera angle, artistic use of lighting and shadow, and other features such as depth of field. This is what we focused on in the Using a camera to render the sculpture section of this chapter when we rendered the example orc sculpture.

However, artistic renders like this don't showcase the sculpture from every angle, and sometimes the lighting can make it difficult to see the details of the sculpture itself. When it comes to making portfolio pieces, it can be helpful to render your sculpture in a way that shows off your sculpting skills more than your lighting and rendering skills.

For this purpose, it is common to center the sculpture in the camera view, brightly light it, and animate it rotating 360 degrees so that it can be seen from every angle. This is called...