Raw materials for 3-D modelers

A collection of the often banal and artless images used in the development and testing of 3-D modeling technologies and digital imaging.

While the “end user” rarely sees any of these images or objects, a handful of them (Lena, the mandrill, the Utah Teapot, the Stanford Bunny and the Cornell Box) are well known to the point of being iconic within the digital imaging research community. They have even become the subjects of inside jokes between programmers and animators: 3D models of the Utah Teapot are hidden in Pixar’s Toy Story, a screensaver that comes as part of Microsoft Windows, and the Simpsons episode where Homer stumbles into a computer-generated “Third Dimension”.

• 3-D
• art