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> 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.
Yep. Looks like the artist just made a glass material and rendered Blender's built-in model. I've surprisingly been unable to find any discussion of this on the web.
If you find yourself in Silicon Valley, you can see the original Utah teapot at the Computer History Museum. They have an incredible collection of artifacts from the beginnings of the computing age.
I don't think it's commonly made by beginner modelers the way helloworld is with programmers. As I understand it, the teapot is more so useful as a pre-built model which you can use to test out different textures, materials, and shaders. It's not too complicated of a shape, but it has curves and flat areas more simple geometry doesn't have.
The classic Utah Teapot.
http://clara.io/player/8d9a8181-f1ce-4340-b24f-e36bbaf318f7
Blender's Suzanne:
http://clara.io/player/fdcbe819-ec7d-4468-99c0-3cc34ede9782
The Stanford Bunny:
http://clara.io/player/616bf87b-c7f2-4925-b0d5-688069aee331
To start editing these (or change the material, even render it via V-Ray, or export as STL) in your browser, just click the "Edit" button in the top left.