Ivan Sutherland's 1972 Mesh?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

First on Wikipedia’s List of common 3D test models is a mesh that Ivan Sutherland’s team made in 1972, a hand-“scanned” VW Bug. I haven’t been able to find anywhere it can be downloaded. Some people seem to have it (most recently saw it used in Keenan Crane’s vid on Heat Methods in Geometry Processing) but, somewhat understandably, none of them seem willing/able to respond to a rando emailing a polite but out-of-the-blue request for the file.

Does anybody here have it? Of course I’d prefer it in a format that can be imported into Blender, but any help appreciated.

2

In 2013 Jason Torchinsky wrote an article on this, in which he said he was going to include a download link. He later decided not to because he didn’t think the file he had was of the original mesh. This morning he responded to my latest attempt to contact him, attaching the file he’d found.

YELLOBUG.3DS (attached below) includes the mesh VWBUG (obj attached below, normals fixed) – looking at the earliest wireframe image of it available, this seems like that mesh with the quads and ngons converted to tris.

Edited to add: I’ve attempted to restore the original topology (as shown in the earliest wireframe image of it available ) and attached the obj below.

YELLOBUG.3DS (196.9 KB)
VWBugMesh002.obj (121.9 KB)
SutherlandTeam_VWBug_MeshTopology_Restoration.obj (103.4 KB)

3

3DCafe’s February 20th 1998 vehicles page on the Wayback Machine has a downloadable lzh archive of it (7-Zip will open it). One of the files inside is VOLKSWGN.LW dated 1985/07/09 07:43:58, looks like the Sutherland mesh with the quads and ngons converted to tris – Blender 2.79 can import it with its included Import Lightwave Objects addon, although the scale’s awfully large. I’ve scaled it to 1.539 m wide and exported it as an obj (included all in the zip):

Sutherland_VOLKSWGN.zip (62.9 KB)

1 Like