If you were at Adobe MAX (or up-to-date on what’s to come for Adobe), then you may have lost your shit after the sneak peek of Fantastic Fold, and justifiably so. A dieline transforms with ease between 2D and 3D, retaining the integrity of the graphics on each panel. Amanda Ghassaei, Research Engineer for Adobe Research, gave the presentation, which was one part software demonstration and one part magic.

“We perform a geometric analysis on a 2D dieline vector file to calculate the final fold angles of the creases and a plausible folding sequence,” Amanda explained. “We hand this information over to a physics-based folding simulation that generates a 3D animation of the folded geometry. We can then map the graphics applied to the 2D design onto this 3D visualization, and use the mapping between 2D and 3D to help with other graphics layout tasks.”