The original teapot the Utah teapot was based on is still available from Friesland Porzellan, once part of the German Melitta group. 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. It was donated to the Boston Computer Museum in 1984, where it was on display until 1990. The original, physical teapot was purchased from ZCMI (a department store in Salt Lake City) in 1974. Teapot scenes are commonly used for renderer self-tests and benchmarks. BeOS and Haiku include a small demo of a rotating 3D teapot, intended to show off the platform's multimedia facilities.
#MESH UNFOLDER DEMO MAC OS X#
Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard also include the teapot as part of Quartz Composer Leopard's teapot supports bump mapping. While D3DX for Direct3D 11 does not provide this functionality anymore, it is supported in the DirectX Tool Kit. Along with the expected cubes and spheres, the GLUT library even provides the function glutSolidTeapot() as a graphics primitive, as does its Direct3D counterpart D3DX ( D3DXCreateTeapot()). Some RenderMan-compliant renderers support the teapot as a built-in geometry by calling RiGeometry("teapot", RI_NULL). Versions of the teapot model - or sample scenes containing it - are distributed with or freely available for nearly every current rendering and modelling program and even many graphic APIs, including AutoCAD, Houdini, Lightwave 3D, MODO, POV-Ray, 3ds Max, and the OpenGL and Direct3D helper libraries. They preferred the appearance of this new version and decided to save the file out of that preference. Jim Blinn stated that he scaled the model on the vertical axis during a demo in the lab to demonstrate that they could manipulate it. The real teapot is 33% taller (ratio 4:3) than the computer model. Later versions of the data set fixed this. Having no surface to represent its base, the original teapot model was not intended to be seen from below. 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. 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.
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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. Newell made the mathematical data that described 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. The teapot shape contained a number of elements that made it ideal for the graphics experiments of the time: it was round, contained saddle points, had a genus greater than zero because of the hole in the handle, could project a shadow on itself, and could be displayed accurately without a surface texture. Following that, he went back to the computer laboratory and edited bézier control points on a Tektronix storage tube, again by hand.
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He sketched the teapot free-hand using graph paper and a pencil. His wife, Sandra Newell, suggested modelling their tea set since they were sitting down for tea at the time. Image courtesy of Computer History Museum.įor his work, Newell needed a simple mathematical model of a familiar object. The actual Melitta teapot that Martin Newell modelled, displayed at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California (1990–present) External imageĪ scan of the original diagram Martin Newell drew up, to plan the Utah Teapot before inputing it digitally.