Teapot subdivision

This image is a descendent of Martin Newell's original tea table scene, celebrating my third-generation updating of his classic teapot model. Dr. Newell taught my Computer Graphics class in 1975-76 at the Computer Science Department of the University of Utah. He became the chair of my thesis research committee in 1976-77. His ideas of combining object-oriented procedural modeling with curved surface geometry strongly influenced my career developing the Alpha_1 research geometric modeling system for the next 20 years at the University of Utah. Martin Newell's Bézier teapot model was one of the first curved-surface objects available to the computer graphics research community. 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 creating this image, I improved on Hank Driskill's second-generation Alpha_1 procedural/NURBS teapot model, and modeled and rendered a scene revealing the lovely new insides of the teapot by slicing it in half like an onion. (Slightly surreal, I admit.) The title, "Teapot Subdivision," is also an oblique reference to the recursive NURBS surface-subdivision algorithm, based on the Oslo Algorithms, that is is used to adaptively create a bounding volume tree to speed up ray-traced rendering in Alpha_1.