Context.

After seeing the viral images made out of QR codes, I wanted to learn and play around to see what I could create. This mini-learning journey brought me deeper into Stable Diffusion, A1111 and ControlNet.

My starting point was to search for a tutorial on generating these types of images, they all led to Stable Diffusion so that was the first setup step. Installing Stable Diffusion locally on my 2012 Macbook was straightforward and getting the Web UI working was the first success. But then to add the QR Monster models required adding Controlnet as an extension and this stopped SD running at all and turned into hours of troubleshooting trying to pin down the bug. The main culprit was limited support for MacOS Catalina, so I simply moved over to a cloud provider ThinkDiffusion as the main idea is to create art, not necessarily run locally.

ThinkDiffusion have some great tutorials to follow, but I found most were dated and following along required some trial and error with the settings

I ended up following some of Sebastian Kamphs' videos, which I highly recommend after watching many.

Final word: going through the setup of Stable Diffusion and then tweaking the settings give a great overview of how tricky these models are to finely control. There is a LOT of trial and error. But if you stick with it, you start to develop a sense of the output and can end up with some great looking results. For anyone looking to delve into genAI art, the QR code art trend is a fun onramp to that world.