Tools to take 3D pictures for a virtual show

I belong to a couple of bonsai clubs, and for this year we wanted to do a virtual show. I’m looking to build a small site where I can drop 30-50 virtual bonsais across several pages so visitors can rotate, zoom in and out, and enjoy details of the trees. Exactly (or very similarly) to what a virtual museum would do with their collection.

It occurred to me that it shouldn’t be very difficult to find a way to photograph every angle of a tree and then stitch together all pictures. Similar to what they used to do with those 3D scanners in the film industry…or even what Google Street View does.

I then realized that a 360° photo is actually the opposite of what I need: I want to rotate the model while the viewer is static. So I tossed away all the 360° apps, including tools to do virtual shows of houses, and 360° cameras.

I then focused on 3D mapping tools. It seems that if you want textures in 3D models, the new hotness is ARKit, but I’m not sure if that’s what I want. I ended up trying Trnio (in the iOS App Store for $4.99) (which came recommended in pages like this one).

It works by either uploading 20-30 pictures from your Camera Roll to their cloud, or using the accelerometers and the live camera to take as many pictures as you want to build the model. I tried to use both methods with a tree on a rotating table but it seems that the Trnio algorithm uses the background to figure out the stitching and the result is horrible (Also, I’m not sure how I would use those models in the end because they can only be exported them to SketchFab.)

Do you know of any way of achieving that without investing in an expensive 3D scanning rig?