In 2003, the first Walking Teapot arrived from the manufacturer looking remarkably like the picture I had sent.
That picture was a RenderMan rendering. Up until then, the Walking Teapot was an improbable and unproven idea. Making it required not simply modeling the Utah teapot as a closed subdivision surface, but learning how to communicate with a toy factory in Hong Kong. Now, after all of that, I could hold it in my hand.
The resemblance was not incidental. The rendering was how we had made it.
Something worth keeping
The original idea started with a simple question: couldn't we make something more interesting than a brochure?
In 2003, a brochure was expected. It was how software was presented at a conference. It was practical, familiar, and probably destined for the bin. I wanted to make something people might actually keep.
The design began with two familiar things. The first was the Utah teapot, a compact 3D model created by computer scientist Martin Newell in the mid-1970s. Its curved body, lid, handle, and spout had made it one of computer graphics' favorite test subjects. Generations of researchers and artists had used it to demonstrate new ways of modeling, shading, lighting, and rendering.
The second thing was feet.
Put them together and the teapot stopped being a test object. It became a character.
The first RenderMan Walking Teapot had a polished silver body, the RenderMan "R" on its side, and a pair of black feet underneath. I imagined it packaged in a small box with an individually numbered certificate, like an indie toy collectible or a Cabbage Patch Kid.
Imagining it was the easy part. I had never manufactured a toy.
One reply
The Walking Teapot became possible because several forms of communication had arrived at roughly the right moment.
The web let me find toy manufacturers I would never otherwise have known existed. Email let me write to them directly. I contacted more than twenty companies.
One wrote back.
The quote was less than a printed brochure. My boss was pleased, and I got the green light.
Now I had a new problem: manufacturing.
I knew some prepress for print. I could prepare specifications and consult my Pantone deck. That helped, but it was not enough to fully describe a small silver teapot balanced on two black feet.
Words could identify the pieces. They could not quite communicate the whole.
Rendering could.
Here is what it should look like
RenderMan gave me a way to show the manufacturer exactly what I wanted: Here is what it should look like when it is done.
The image communicated everything: the shape of the body, the finish of the metal, the placement of the graphics, the colors, the proportions, and the relationship between the teapot and its feet. It delivered all of that immediately. We sent images back and forth, marked up with arrows pointing at renderings.
The rendering was not merely a picture of the product. It was essential for the product to exist.
A piece of rendering software helped inspire the object and helped get it made. It was, in a way, a testament to itself.
The moment of truth
We shipped thousands of teapots to SIGGRAPH, and we had a new problem. Nobody quite knew what to make of it.
It clearly wasn't a brochure.
When people were told, "The brochure is inside as an instructional manual," many just stared blankly at the box. It was an industry filled with demonstrations, benchmarks, and glossy brochures.
People gradually caught on. The next year, the lines started forming.
Variations on a body
Over the following years, the original model became a palette for new editions and colorways. Some responded to Pixar films. Others reflected developments in RenderMan or the visual culture surrounding SIGGRAPH. The teapot became translucent, grew flames, put on a chef's hat, acquired racing goggles, sprouted horns, and turned into a shark.
The basic anatomy remained recognizable: body, spout, handle, lid, feet. Nearly everything else was negotiable.
Placed together, the editions form a peculiar chronology of rendering culture. Their surfaces move from polished metal to translucency, decoration, and stylized linework. The changing object records both technical progress and the community growing around it.
People kept them
That was the part I had hoped for in 2003. People kept the teapots.
They photographed them at conferences, on desks, in studios, and far from home. One traveled to Antarctica. Others appeared in collections, online exchanges, demonstrations, short films, and increasingly elaborate group portraits.
Owning one came to mean belonging to a particular corner of the computer-graphics world. Finding an old edition could feel like archaeology. Bringing several together produced immediate comparisons and arguments: favorite year, rarest version, best costume, strangest mutation.
Eventually the joke acquired its own history.
The Walking Teapot appeared in music and animation, including This Teapot's Made for Walking and the short Teapot Meets Potzilla - spoiler alert, both created by me. The latter used RenderMan's Stylized Looks to turn the familiar computer-generated object into something closer to Marv Newland's classic short Bambi Meets Godzilla.
The traveling museum
In 2018, fifteen years after the first edition, the Walking Teapot received its own museum exhibition at SIGGRAPH.
The museum made visible something I had not planned when I designed the first model. Repetition had turned into continuity. A rebellion against brochures had become a rite of passage for the community. At the museum, people would tell me their first year at SIGGRAPH, which teapot they received, and that it was still sitting on their desk.
I suppose the Walking Teapot reflects the journey of RenderMan itself: a nod to the past and an ever-evolving vision for the future. And RenderMan made the toy possible.
At least we can say, not many brochures get a museum.