Martin Newell's original teapot

Abstract

Dr. Martin Newell researched advanced modeling and rendering techniques for digital image synthesis in the Computer Science Department of the University of Utah. This is the original Utah Teapot, as presented by its creator in his Ph.D dissertation in the summer of 1975. The teapot became a benchmark model for image synthesis programs, as well as a computer graphics icon in the SIGGRAPH research community, and the computer animation industry that grew out of it. In 1975, shaded rendering of simple faceted 3D polygon models was new, and the next frontier was finding ways to increase the visible complexity of images. Curved shapes could be approximated by a large number of polygons, but such models were laborious to create, and taxed the small memory capacity of the computers of the day. It is far more elegant to represent smooth objects with a naturally smooth curved-surface representation such as bicubic Bezier patches. But there were few curved-surface objects available to computer graphics researchers at the time. Dr. Newell modeled and rendered this table setting scene, including a teapot, tea cups, saucers and spoons, and a milk pitcher, all on a table top with a draped curtain as a background. The Bezier control points of the teapot and other objects were made available within the close-knit DARPA-Net computer graphics research community of the time, and later posted to Usenet newsgroups and the Internet, where they can still be found.