A Pig, an Angel and a Cactus Walk Into a Blender: A Descriptive Approach to Visual Blending

OK, the first thing I noticed here were the pictures. It’s not every day you see a cactus pig.

This paper, by João M. Cunha, João Gonçalves, Pedro Martins, Penousal Machado, Amílcar Cardoso, presents a visual blending system that uses a structured approach to blend little sketches together. Because it is aware of the structure and relationships of the component parts of the sketch, it can find analogies between different sketches.

Generating new things by combining other things is a tried-and-true procgen method, but the novel thing here is that not only is the computer figuring out how to combine the parts, but that the results are combined in ways that feel fresh. The various pig-angels aren’t as obviously kitbashed as if they’d been modularized by hand. They have a cohesion. I’d be interested to see how widely this works with other sketched objects.

Not to mention that I can see a great application for this and related techniques being applied to some other domains, like generating parts for a level designer to use.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.09076
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.09076.pdf