I wanna be careful about invoking the “Melitta” company name – acknowledging that this iconic 3D standard test model of over forty years standing was drawn from a Melitta teapot is one thing, naming an add-on “Melitta” (or any of the stuff an add-on makes) looks like tempting the wrath of corporate legal teams.
That having been said, the initial reason for this topic is that, while attempting to get a Blender-usable mesh of Catmull’s bicubic patch model Gumbo the Elephant, I realized that the 1991-uploaded teacup data can easily be added to add_mesh_teapot.py, and I thought that everybody who’s using Blender should have the same ease-of-access to the teacup as they’ve had to the teapot and teaspoon for the last decade. Once you start thinking that here’s another 40+ year old bicubic patch model it’d be nice to include, and this one over here, and, and, and, and . . . that’s about another add-on entirely, one that reads any bicubic patch data you point it at and gives you a nice Blender-usable mesh.
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It occurred to me that since that little milk pitcher was part of an image Newell made for his PhD thesis “The Utilization of Procedure Models in Digital Image Synthesis” that the datasets might’ve been included, maybe in an appendix. Found the thesis, and no, it doesn’t include the datasets. Nice graphics, though:
Again, if anybody can come up with the data for this bicubic patch model I’d love to include it. In the meantime, I still don’t know what should be done to propose this gets added to Blender’s add_mesh_teapot.py. And just FYI, I’m in rural East Tennessee, in an area that most winters looses power (sometimes for days) during bad weather events, so I may drop out for a while.