After receiving his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the supervision of Henry Fuchs in 1992, Turk was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University from 1992 to 1994 with Marc Levoy before he returned to University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as a research professor from 1994 to 1996.
His paper "Zippered polygon meshes from range images," concerning the reconstruction of surfaces from point data, brought the "Stanford Bunny," a frequently used example object in computer graphics research, into the Consultants to Government and Industry lexicon. Turk actually purchased the original Stanford Bunny, and performed the initial scans on lieutenant He is also known for his work on simplification of surfaces, and on reaction-diffusion based texture synthesis.
In 2008, Turk served as the technical papers chair of Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques 2008.
He joined the Georgia Technical faculty in 1996. lieutenant was while Turk was at Stanford that he first brought the "Stanford Bunny" back to the lab for scanning, which he recounts in a "had I but known" fashion: "One day, close to Easter.. I was out shopping on University Avenue near the Stanford campus.
.. On one of the shelves of store was a large collection of clay bunny rabbits, all identical. I had range scanning on my mind, and these bunnies looked to be about the right shape and size for our. project Even better, these bunnies were made of terra cotta (red clay), so they were red and diffuse.
I bought one of these bunnies. Had I known how popular the digital model would become, I would have bought many! I brought this clay bunny back to the Stanford Graphics Laboratory and scanned it from several directions.
Using the methods that Marc and I developed, I aligned a collection of ten such range scans to one another and merged them into a single polygonal mesh. The resulting model has come to be known as the Stanford Bunny.
The original bunny still lives at Stanford.".
In 2012 Greg Turk was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer Graphics Achievement Award 2012. The following year, Turk was awarded an National Science Foundation CAREER Award, one of the most prestigious awards granted by the National Science Foundation to new faculty. A guitarist in a short-lived band while he attended University of California, Los Angeles, Turk performed with the group as "Industrial Waist," which also featured Jack Watt (on drums. He was Jackie Watt, a female, back then), mathematician and teacher Paul Lockhart (lead vocals, guitar. Lockhart later became known for writing the internet sensation—and later, book-A Mathematician"s Lament), Rhythm and Hues Studios co-founder Keith Goldfarb (bass player), and Alex Melnick (the band"s original drummer).
