"As anyone who is into 3D computer graphics knows, there is something mysterious and special about The Teapot. It's not just any teapot - it's 'the' teapot. The teapot was made by Melitta in 1974 and originally belonged to Martin Newell and his wife, Sandra - who purchased it from ZCMI, (a department store in Salt Lake City). The teapot was eventually donated to the Boston Computer Museum but now resides in the Ephemera collection of the Computer History Museum. It's cataloged as 'Teapot used for Computer Graphics rendering' and bears the catalog number X00398.1984."
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2007-04-29
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When I was starting to get involved with 3D CGI in the early nineties using 3D Studio for DOS and TOPAS I saw the teapot for the first time. Initially I thought that it was as uninspiring as an object can get for reference for 3D modelers but later I learned that the teapot was so famous because it had lots of attributes that were hard to model during the early years of computer generated 3D imagery.
It was so popular that 3DSMax even had a teapot primitive on its toolbox and most beginners tutorials included the teapot to demonstrate lightning, texturing and a few other things (don't know if that's still true as I haven't used that app in years).
Even for someone who already has a head start on 3D modeling, it can be somewhat challenging to model it and I believe that I saw it as an exercise in certain 3D modeling classes out there.
Man, what a trip down Memory Lane... Thanks, Thom!
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2008-02-28
True CG geeks will remember the SIGGRAPH in 1989 when the five basic solid geometric forms proven by the ancient Greeks was extended from five to six. The historical solids, the cube, dodecahedron, icosahedron, octahedron, and tetrahedron were augmented by the most recent discovery, the Teapotahedron.
It was a discovery greeted with much enthusiasm by all, with the teapotahedron being famous ever since.
