Here's how people are making those viral 3D figurines

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Google's Nano Banana has sparked its first trend.

It seems each major new AI image generator sparks a new viral trend that takes over the internet for a few days. With the launch of GPT‑4o back in March, it was Studio Ghibli-style images. Now with Google's Nano Banana, AKA Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, it's 3D figurines.

It isn't an entirely new trend. People had already displayed a penchant for creating action figures of themselves using GPT-4o. But Nano Banana appears to be capable of more detail and more sophisticated prompt adherence. Sometimes they're cute, and sometimes they're more than a little creepy. People have also discovered that they can turn static images of their 3D figurines into videos.

What is the AI 3D figurine trend?

The latest AI 3D figurine trend has been sparked by the release of Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, better known as Nano Banana. Google itself promoted the trend by posting images generated by the model on social media.

People upload a photograph of themselves or another subject to Gemini and provide a text prompt with instructions to generate an image of a 3D figurine. With the right prompt, the AI model can generate an image that combines the likeness of the reference photo with the look of a detailed toy figure, including any props or accessories and packaging.

In most cases, people are generating images in which the 3D figurine is placed on a desk in front of a computer screen that displays a design for the toy in one of the best 3D modelling programs.

How do people make AI 3D figurines?

You can try to generate an image that looks like a 3D figurine using various AI models, but people are mainly using google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, (Nano Banana) since it does a sometimes scarily accurate job and it's freely available in Google's own AI Studio.

Click on 'Try Nano Banana'. You'll be given a box to type in a prompt. The prompt that Google suggests is:

Create a 1/7 scale commercialized figurine of the characters in the picture, in a realistic style, in a real environment. The figurine is placed on a computer desk. The figurine has a round transparent acrylic base, with no text on the base. The content on the computer screen is a 3D modeling process of this figurine. Next to the computer screen is a toy packaging box, designed in a style reminiscent of high-quality collectible figures, printed with original artwork. The packaging features two-dimensional flat illustrations.

A photo of a photographer with a tripod beside two AI-generated images of 3D figurines based on the image

(Image credit: Joe Foley / AI-generated)

It's at times like this that I realise how few photos I have of myself – particularly full-length ones. The only one I could find was a relatively low-resolution photo taken in quite harsh conditions, so Nano Banana didn't have great data to work with, but the model still managed to identify the subject of the photo, complete with mate and tripod, and turn it into a 3D figure.

With a better quality image, you're likely to get more detail and a more realistic likeness. You can also add instructions to the prompt to specify if you want the figurine to be in a different pose. You can also specify any text you want to appear on the packaging and it does a fairly decent job at apply that instead of the usual AI garbled text. As with all AI image generators, results can be inconsistent.

You can animate your AI-generated image using any number of AI video generators that are coming out.

Prefer to get more creative and do it an old-school way? Don't miss the optical illusion of the year competition entry that ingeniously recreated the AI figurine trend for real.

For more AI news, don't miss the story of OpenAI's big bet on AI filmmaking with its AI animation Critterz.

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Joe Foley
Joe Foley
Freelance journalist and editor

Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.

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