A common task for many creative professionals is to mockup a design onto a real world object. This can be tedious when putting a logo onto a box, difficult when mapping a decal onto a mug, and outright impossible when dealing with putting a label onto a t-shirt with wrinkles. Fortunately, we can analyze the 3D structure of the target image and automate this process in Mockup for Illustrator.

I provided the underlying depth estimator that enables this technology, which is the outcome of a multi-year effort that started with our 3D Ken Burns paper that I have been continuously improving since then. On this note, depth estimation is tricky to get right and pretty depth maps, like the once one might find popping up on social media every once in a while, don't necessarily work well for downstream applications.