Utah teapot

The so-called Utah teapot (English: Utah teapot ) is one of the oldest and most famous 3D models in computer graphics. It is a simple surface model of a teapot, in which the inner cavity is not visible. Martin Newell she developed in 1975 as part of its computer graphics research at the University of Utah.

Origin

Newell needed a simple mathematical model of a utility object for his work, and his wife Melitta teapot seemed suitable: The form has some necessary properties for the former purpose; it is round, has saddle points and concave elements (especially the hole in the handle) and looks without complex surface texture quite appealing.

After Newell had a description of the teapot designed as a Bezier surface, took over other research groups, the model for their work, so that the object to a reference model for computer graphics was.

Dissemination

In computer magazines were regularly over the years variants of the Teapot presented and known 3D software products today contain mostly as images or scenes that contain the teapot. The OpenGL graphics library GLUT even has a feature called glutSolidTeapot () and the 3D animation program 3d Studio Max contains today the teapot as a basic design object in a plane with the cylinder and the cube.

Meanwhile, the teapot has become a kind of running gag in the computer graphics scene and the model was "hidden" in the first computer- animated short films and later in major motion pictures. The teapot is in Monsters, Inc., Toy Story and the Disney production Discovering the Beauty and the Beast. In the computer game Serious Sam: The First Encounter is to be found in the context of a benchmark game level. They also can be found in the Windows screen saver (only versions of Windows 95/98/NT ) 3D pipes where they randomly (very rare) is displayed instead of a normal corner joint of the pipes. Also the Open GL screen saver pipes for X Window Systems builds the teapot occasionally in different positions in the tube paths.

More 3D Models

Other well-known test models of 3D computer graphics are the Standard Procedural Databases by Eric Haines, which are often used for measuring the performance of ray tracing acceleration techniques, the Cornell box, and the models of the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository. The free 3D software Blender used called a low-poly model of a monkey head, Suzanne.