Yesterday's Adobe MAX 2024 presentation of Project Turntable for Illustrator has set the design world abuzz with excitement. If the tool works as demoed, it will change how artists work with 2D vector shapes, allowing them to manipulate and rotate designs around all three axes without having to redraw them.
Jun-Chin Chen, the project's presenter, demonstrated the tool's capabilities using a scene featuring a warrior and a dragon. He highlighted a common problem faced by illustrators: "I want a warrior to fight a dragon, but I suddenly realized that the warrior is looking in the wrong direction." Traditionally, this would require completely redrawing the shape—a time-consuming process.
With Project Turntable, however, artists can simply select the shape and use a slider to rotate it. Chen emphasized, "That's it. That's how you do rotation."
The art maintains editability after rotation. Chen demonstrated this by adding horns to a bat shape and updating all rotated versions simultaneously: "To edit all of them, I just need to edit this one."
As with other previews, Adobe is still testing Project Turntable, and no official launch dates are available.
