I recently found some stunning images of snails covered in swirling rainbow patterns (see here, the last two images) an an image of a snail with fairy houses on its back (see here). All of them were generated by Stable Diffusion. (No promises that these links will always work.) Since the prompts were publicly available, I went ahead and tried them to see what I would get. I submitted each prompt to a model of Stable Diffusion 1.5 (Imagine V1) and two different models of Stable Diffusion 2.1 (Imagine V3 and Imagine V4 by vyro.ai).
Here are the results for the rainbow snail prompt:
Rainbow Snails, Original Prompt, Imagine V1
Rainbow Snails, Original Prompt, Imagine V3
Rainbow Snails, Original Prompt, Imagine V4
Let's pause for a few thoughts. First, all three models struggled to accurately depict a snail. Many of the images have snails with eyes on the body instead of on the eyestalks. Many of the images gave have snails with legs and feet. And the shell rarely looks right. And only Imagine V3 produce anything reasonably close to rainbow coloration. A couple of the images from Imagine V3 are almost as good as the ones I drew inspiration from.
Okay. So how did these models fare with the fairy house prompt?
Fairy House Snails, Original Prompt, Imagine V1
Fairy House Snails, Original Prompt, Imagine V3
Fairy House Snails, Original Prompt, Imagine V4
We've already discussed the failings of the different models when drawing snails, so I won't belabor that any further. Imagine V1 drew some fun fairy houses, but the snail element is mostly missing. Imagine V3 and Imagine V4 swung in the opposite direction and hardly depicted fairy houses at all. For sure, there were a couple from each one that have fairy houses, but they're not as impressive as the original.
My next thought was to have CLIP Interrogator generate prompts from the original images. Here is the prompt it came up with for the first rainbow snail:
brightly colored snail with colorful shell on pink flowered field, amazing fantasy art, HD macro photographs, colorful intricate masterpiece, beautiful and cute, colorful and dark, very attractive and beautiful, attractive and good looking, alluring and terrifying
And here are the results from the three Stable Diffusion models using this prompt:
Rainbow Snails, Generated Prompt 1, Imagine V1
Rainbow Snails, Generated Prompt 1, Imagine V3
Rainbow Snails, Generated Prompt 1, Imagine V4
The same problems with drawing snails are still present. But since the prompt from CLIP Interrogator mentions the color pink, it shows up prominently in most of the images, especially the images from Imagine V1. The results from Imagine V3 almost look like Lisa Frank stickers.
Moving on. Here is the prompt that CLIP Interrogator came up with for the second rainbow snail:
brightly colored snail with spiral shell on colorful flower background, fantasy painting HD, ultra HD wallpaper, digital art, colorful intricate masterpiece, colored elephant art, seashell, soft rainbow
And here are the results from the three Stable Diffusion models using this second generated prompt:
Rainbow Snails, Generated Prompt 2, Imagine V1
Rainbow Snails, Generated Prompt 2, Imagine V3
Rainbow Snails, Generated Prompt 2, Imagine V4
I guess I didn't look too closely at the prompt from CLIP Interrogator because when I started seeing elephants in the results from Imagine V1, I was nonplussed. Anyway, this prompt was clearly more difficult for the models to interpret. Imagine V1 tried to incorporate everything and ended up producing flowery rainbow 'snailephants'. Imagine V3 and Imagine V4 ignored the elephant (mostly) and just drew snail flowers or plain flowers.
Ah, well. Here is the prompt that CLIP Interrogator came up with for the fairy house snail:
there is a snail with a house on its back, Beeple and Jeremiah Ketner, video game render, soft render, animated character design, with photorealistic lighting, Pieter Henket, shell, trending on DeviantArtHQ, stunning screenshot, cute creatures, smug look, animation style render, township, pastel artwork, gloomy, Astri Lohne, the best on CGSociety
And here are the results from the three Stable Diffusion models using this generated prompt:
Fairy House Snails, Generated Prompt, Imagine V1
Fairy House Snails, Generated Prompt, Imagine V3
Fairy House Snails, Generated Prompt, Imagine V4
As with the original prompt, Imagine V1 drew houses without snails. Imagine V3 and Imagine V4 drew snails near houses. But none of them drew houses on the snail shells.
Since I used different Stable Diffusion models than the originals, I didn't expect to get results that were nearly identical. And in that I was not wrong. Overall, I'd say that I got the best results from Imagine V3 with the original prompts.
Some prompts were generated using CLIP Interrogator 2.4.
The illustrations were drawn using Stable Diffusion 2.1.
