Mario Mercedes!

Final Image
Process Image

Inspiration

We decided to generate an image inspired by the Mercedes-Benz x Mario Kart 8 (a Nintendo video game) collaboration, and capture the creativity, innovation and fun that both brands embody.

What it does

The program is able to generate an image of Mario driving a Mercedes car on a cobbled street with a sunny sky background. This image generation aims to promote the Mario Kart video game series and Mercedes Benz.

How we built it

We used Dreambooth to generate the Mercedes car, Mario and the sunny sky together in one image, where the same model was used to train on both elements. This was followed by masked in-painting to incorporate the cobbled street as well as upscaling to increase the quality.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was generating Mario as the character has more complex features. Additionally, as we were combining both the Mario game style as well as photorealistic images, it was difficult to produce cohesive images. Inpainting also proved to be a challenge, as it was difficult to generate the exact images we needed to be able to incorporate the different elements correctly (for example, to combine the car and cobbled street).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of successfully generating images of Mario in a Mercedes car. This has been difficult to do in the beginning and most of the generated images did not work out well in the beginning.

What we learned

We learned how to generate images with a in-painting and upscaling techniques. We also experimented with different ways of combining image outputs in order to generate a final image. We also learned how to combine and save models that we trained our data on.

What's next for Mario Mercedes

In the future, we would like to be able to add more cars to our image (to show off the many cars in Mario Kart). We’re quite happy with our final image, but because product marketing is important, given more time, we would also like to integrate the Nintendo™ logo into our images. We’ve generated some initial logos using Dreambooth which you can see below.