Teapots & Sets

The Utah teapot or Newell teapot is a 3D model which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community. more...

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It is a mathematical model of an ordinary teapot of comparatively simple shape, which appears solid, cylindrical and partially convex.

The teapot model was created in 1975 by early computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, a member of the pioneering graphics program at the University of Utah.

History

Newell needed a moderately simple mathematical model of a familiar object for his work. Sandra Newell (his wife) suggested modelling their tea service since they were sitting down to tea at the time. He got some graph paper and a pencil, and sketched the entire tea service by eye. Then, he went back to the lab and edited bézier control points on a Tektronix storage tube, again by hand.

The teapot shape contains a number of elements that made it ideal for the graphics experiments of the time — it is round, contains saddle points, has a genus greater than zero because of the hole in the handle, can project a shadow on itself, and looks reasonable when displayed without a complex surface texture.

Newell made the mathematical data that describes the teapot's geometry (a set of three-dimensional coordinates) publicly available, and soon other researchers began to use the same data for their computer graphics experiments. These researchers needed something with roughly the same characteristics that Newell had, and using the teapot data meant they did not have to laboriously enter geometric data for some other object. Although technical progress has meant that the act of rendering the teapot is no longer the challenge it was in 1975, the teapot continued to be used as a reference object for increasingly advanced graphics techniques.

Over the following decades, editions of computer graphics journals (such as the ACM SIGGRAPH's quarterly) regularly featured versions of the teapot: faceted or smooth-shaded, wireframe, bumpy, translucent, refractive, even leopard-skin and furry teapots were created.

The original teapot model was never intended to be seen from below and had no surface to represent the base of the teapot; later versions of the data set have fixed this.

The real teapot is noticeably taller than the computer model because Newell's frame buffer used non-square pixels. Rather than distorting the image, Newell's colleague Jim Blinn reportedly scaled the geometry to cancel out the stretching, and when the model was shared with users of other systems, the scaling stuck. Height scale factor was 1.3.

The original, physical teapot was purchased from ZCMI (a department store in Salt Lake City, Utah) in 1974. It was donated to the Boston Computer Museum in 1984 where it was on display until 1990. It now resides in the ephemera collection at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California where it is catalogued as \"Teapot used for Computer Graphics rendering\" and bears the catalogue number X00398.1984.

Read more at Wikipedia.org