More info: http://www.cs.utah.edu/gdc/projects/alpha1/help/man/html/model_repo/model_teapot/model_teapot.html http://www.cs.utah.edu/gdc/projects/alpha1/help/m

More info: http://www.cs.utah.edu/gdc/projects/alpha1/help/man/html/model_repo/model_teapot/model_teapot.html http://www.cs.utah.edu/gdc/projects/alpha1/help/man/html/mod... > The way I got the story (this was even before my time as a grad student at Utah) the original teapot was modeled by Martin Newell and rendered by Jim Blinn in 1974 or early 1975. The Utah Teapot was the first computer graphics object to be designed and rendered as sculptured surfaces, rather than as a set of polygons. The design program which was used to create it used bicubic Bezier patches as a representation, and used a Tektronix storage tube connected to a DEC PDP-10. Position continuity between Bezier patches was maintained by keeping control points on the edges of adjacent 4 x 4 patch control meshes in the same place. Tangent continuity between patches was maintained by keeping the control mesh links adjoining adjacent edges collinear. I don't know how the radial and bilateral symmetries were maintained. (You can find more interesting info there as well) I've actually used a derivative of the software alpha_1, at Utah while I was a high school program at the U. I actually used it to create a model of Escher's Belvedere, IIRC using NURBs for the dome.