Teapots, Sets

The Utah teapot or Newell teapot is a 3D model which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community. It is a simple, round, solid, partially concave mathematical model of an ordinary teapot. more...

The teapot model was created in 1975 by early computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, a member of the pioneering graphics program at the University of Utah. Newell needed a moderately simple mathematical model of a familiar object for his work, and his wife's teapot, a Melitta, provided a convenient solution. The shape contains a number of elements that made it ideal for the graphics experiments of the time — it is round, contains saddle points, has a genus greater than zero because of the hole in the handle, can project a shadow on itself, and looks reasonable when displayed without a complex surface texture.

Newell made the mathematical data that describe the teapot's geometry (largely a set of three-dimensional coordinates) publicly available, and soon other researchers began to use the same data for their computer graphics experiments. These researchers needed something with roughly the same characteristics that Newell had, and using the teapot data meant they didn't have to laboriously enter geometric data for some other object. Although technical progress has meant that the act of rendering the teapot is no longer the challenge it was in 1975, the teapot continued to be used as a reference object for increasingly advanced graphics techniques.

Read more at Wikipedia.org