The Utah teapot paperweight 1991
Takafumi Saito · 2006
This teapot was introduced in the presentation of the paper "NC-Machining with G-buffer Method" in SIGGRAPH '91. In 1980's, the surface patch data of the Utah teapot was widely used as a 3D shape example, and many computer generated teapot images were presented in SIGGRAPH and other conference or journal papers. However, nobody had made the Utah teapot as a real 3D solid. In 1990, we developed a simple framework for NC machining with image processing techniques called G-buffer method. In the experiments, we used the teapot data and milled a lot of "hemi-teapots." It worked so nicely that we submitted the paper to SIGGRAPH '91. After we noticed the acceptance of the paper, we made a pair of hemi-teapots by milling modeling wax, and ordered a foundry 200 Utah teapots of cast metal. This is one of them. We believe it is the first NC machined Utah teapot in the world.