Render from a lot of different angles (spherically)

I would like to “photograph” an object from a lot of different angles. What’s the best way to achieve that?

I was thinking maybe you could add a sphere and use each vertex as a point for the camera, but snapping the camera manually would be insane. I guess you could write a script, but I thought I’d just ask here first if there’s any other way to do it.

If it isn’t animating, you could parent your camera to an empty, animate the empty’s rotation/scale/position (or otherwise animate the camera) so that you cover all the angles you’re interested in, and render out an image sequence. That seems to be the easiest way, to my mind.

Why not just put a whole bunch of camera-objects out there, each one where you want them? There’s no limit (AFAIK) on the number of cameras there can be. You can animate everything in the Blender environment. I doubt you would even need to use a Python script…

Now… if you’re not quite sure how you’re going to cut-together the final image sequence, you might decide to literally film the shot from all those angles, perhaps using a Python script to help you, so that you get a bunch of individual strips that you can then edit together using Blender or some third-party editing package; treating the whole project literally in the same way that a movie-director might do.