“That's magic”
The onstage demo showed rotations for a number of varied images, from largely symmetrical dragons, horses, and bats to more complex shapes such as an outline of a bread basket or a living cup of fries (complete with arms, legs, eyes, and a mouth). In both cases, the machine learning algorithm does an admirable job of taking invisible parts of the model from what is available in the original 2D rendering, extrapolating a full set of legs onto a side-view horse or the bottom of the Fry Man's shoes, for example, aptitude.
By vertical rotation you can see the bottom of Fry Man's shoes here.
By vertical rotation you can see the bottom of Fry Man's shoes here.
Credit: Adobe
Still, we're confident that the vector models on stage were chosen to show Project Turntable in its best light. Without a public, testable version, it's hard to say how it would handle weird edge cases or drawings that don't closely match objects in the training data (whose size we don't know).
Yet what was shown on stage has a clear appeal to working artists. After seeing the video on stage, Ars creative director Aurich Lawson exclaimed over our internal Slack, “That's magic. I don't know how well it actually works – I bet it's not nearly as good as that demo – but I'm impressed.”
Project Turntable is also notable because it complements original work by human artists rather than replacing it with images created entirely by AI. While Project Turntable saves these artists the trouble of drawing their 2D objects and characters from multiple angles, that human artist is still responsible for the overall style and look of that original work. Maintaining that human style seems to be a key point for Adobe, which points out that “even after rotation, the vector graphics remain true to the original form, so you don't lose any of the essence of the design.”
Adobe's Brian Domingo told the Creative Bloq blog that there is still no guarantee that Project Turntable will ever be released commercially. However, given the obvious enthusiasm from the demo crowd at the MAX conference, we think it's safe to assume that Adobe will do everything it can to get this feature ready for prime time as quickly as possible.
