Electron Microscope

This is a poster I created as a visual joke as well as a visually attractive piece.

The teapot is a standard object in 3d studio Max and dates back to the earliest days of 3d computer graphics. I was working on faking an electron Microscope image and needed other objects to place in the scene. After some trial and error I settled on the teapot model as it lends a sense of humour to the scene.

One famous ray-traced image (by Jim Arvo and Dave Kirk, from their '87 SIGGRAPH paper `Fast Ray Tracing by Ray Classification.') shows six stone columns five of which are surmounted by the platonic solids (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron) - and the sixth has a teapot. The image is titled "The Six Platonic Solids" - which has lead some people to call the teapot a "Teapotahedron".

The 'hair' strand object is a series of cylinder objects with a noise black and white texture and heavy bump map. I am very pleased with the realism level. The background was created by adding a mirror behind the model and behind the camera, giving the appearance of many hairs and teapots without having to have them in real time models.