Tempestuous Teapot

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System


Requires a Wolfram Notebook System


The "Utah Teapot" is an image created by Martin Newell in the 1970s for computer graphics work. It remains in use to this day as a graphics icon (and not just a relic, though the actual model is now in a museum). Indeed, many aspects of graphics and underlying computational geometry get tested on this image. Here we "explode" it; you can see that the 32 distinct parametric patches have varying degrees of visual complexity. This in turn helps demonstrate why the difficulty of operations such as finding their implicit representations varies so much among individual patches.

Contributed by: Yu-Sung Chang and Daniel Lichtblau (March 2011)
Based on a program by: Jan Mangaldan
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA




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