Recently, various regions across the country have entered a high-temperature "steaming and grilling" mode. A clever idea from netizens has transformed buildings into ice cream, providing a visual "cooling" effect for everyone.
The ice cream building series by blogger @quyuan is hugely popular on Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book). He uses AI tools to turn landmarks such as Beijing's Temple of Heaven, the Big Underpants Building, and the Yellow Crane Tower into ice cream, allowing people to quench their thirst by gazing at these "icy" treats. This series quickly sparked enthusiastic discussions upon its release. Some netizens joked that they must have woken up too early, as even buildings appear to be ice cream shapes in 40-degree heat.
As we can see, @quyuan's series has performed exceptionally well on Xiaohongshu, with the best-performing post being "38-degree Shanghai, craving ice cream," which garnered 49,000 likes and over 7,000 saves. The posts featuring landmarks in Nanchang, Hangzhou, and other cities also did very well.
So, how are these delectable ice cream buildings created? Today, AIbase is sharing how such creative architectural images are made.
To create these images, you'll need the following materials and tools:
1. A photo of a landmark building (or use an AI drawing tool to generate one if you don't have a photo)
2. Drawing tools (SD or Dreamina)
Here are the detailed steps:
Step 1: Image Extraction
Since AIbase doesn't have a photo of a landmark building, we'll use Dreamina to generate one by entering the building's name.
Access Dreamina here: https://top.aibase.com/tool/jimengdreamina
AIbase enters "Beijing's Temple of Heaven, clean background" in the image generation text box, selects model 1.4, and gets the following photo.
Enter the Smart Canvas, upload the image, and select the top extraction option.
The canvas will automatically select the main subject. If it selects too much, use the eraser at the top to erase; if it selects too little, use the canvas to paint and add the selection area. Once the area selection is correct, click the extraction button below.
After extraction, click the export button in the top right corner, and remember to save the format as PNG.
Step 2: Drawing the Ice Cream Building
The common method is to use SD to draw. However, if you're not comfortable with SD, you can also use Dreamina's Smart Canvas to create. AIbase will demonstrate the steps for using both tools in detail.
Method 1: Using SD to Draw
I'll use LiblibAI for demonstration:
The main feature of the ice cream building is that it retains the original building's shape and replaces the building materials such as steel and cement with colorful and attractive ice cream.
Therefore, using SD allows for better control over the image's effect.
Large Model: Dream_and_Daily
Lora: 2.5DGelato Style, Ice Cream Texture/Ice Cream
Sampling Method: Euler a Steps: 30
Core Prompts: Ice cream, popsicle, macaron colors (you can freely combine specific colors)
The Lora value is about 0.5
To fix the building's shape, two ControlNets are needed. One is Canny (hard edges), and the other is Depth (depth map).
Canny can draw the building's lines and some surface details, while Depth refers to the depth of the image and the general outline.
Then, you can get several ice cream buildings and download the ones you're satisfied with.
The effect is as follows:
If you want a more delicate effect, you can also choose to use a sketch plus a depth map.
The effect is as follows:
Method 2: Directly Using Dreamina to Draw
Upload the extracted image from the Smart Canvas as a reference, and choose a stylized or general XLpro model.
Core Prompts: Ice cream, cream, macaron colors
The generated effect is as follows:
In the test effect images by AIbase, the general XLpro seems to have more of a creamy melting feel. Here, I choose the effect generated by general XLpro for further processing.
Continue to use the Smart Canvas extraction tool to extract the main building, then overlay it with the original image. This ensures that your ice cream building is placed against a real background.
Below are the finished product images of the ice cream buildings created by AIbase using SD and Dreamina. You can choose based on your situation.
That concludes today's tutorial sharing. You can view more previous tutorial content here: https://www.aibase.com/course
