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Martin Newell's original teapot

Published: 30 July 2006 Publication History

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 Bézier 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 Bézier 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.

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  • (2023)Differentiable Rendering of Parametric GeometryACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/361838742:6(1-18)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2023
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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGGRAPH '06: ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Teapot

Copyright restrictions prevent ACM from providing the full text for the Teapot exhibits
July 2006
ISBN:1595933646
DOI:10.1145/1180098
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 30 July 2006

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)NeRF-Texture: Synthesizing Neural Radiance Field TexturesIEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence10.1109/TPAMI.2024.338219846:9(5986-6000)Online publication date: Sep-2024
  • (2023)Methods to Reduce Energy and Polymer Consumption for Fused Filament Fabrication 3D PrintingPolymers10.3390/polym1508187415:8(1874)Online publication date: 13-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Differentiable Rendering of Parametric GeometryACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/361838742:6(1-18)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2023
  • (2014)A prototype implementation of OpenGL SC on a massively-parallel architecture2014 IEEE/AIAA 33rd Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC)10.1109/DASC.2014.6979538(8B4-1-8B4-8)Online publication date: Oct-2014
  • (2012)CoasterJournal of Computing Sciences in Colleges10.5555/2379703.237974028:1(192-199)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2012
  • (2010)The City of Sights: Design, construction, and measurement of an Augmented Reality stage set2010 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality10.1109/ISMAR.2010.5643564(157-163)Online publication date: Oct-2010

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