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 CGI lexicon.
[2] After receiving his Ph.D. 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 UNC-Chapel Hill as a research professor from 1994 to 1996.
On one of the shelves of [a] store was a large collection of clay bunny rabbits, all identical.
I brought this clay bunny back to the Stanford Graphics Lab and scanned it from several directions.
Using the methods that Marc and I [had] developed, I aligned a collection of ten such range scans to one another and merged them into a single polygonal mesh.
He attended Santa Monica High School in the 1970s, where he was a member of the nonmusical group "The Olive Starlight Orchestra", along with David Linden, Keith Goldfarb, David Coons, Susan P. Crawford, Eric Enderton and Jan Steckel.
A guitarist in a short-lived band while he attended UCLA, Turk performed with the group as "Industrial Waist", which also had Jack Watt (on drums; formerly Jackie Watt before he transitioned), the mathematician and teacher Paul Lockhart (lead vocals, guitar; Lockhart later became known for writing the internet sensation, and later book, A Mathematician's Lament), the Rhythm and Hues Studios co-founder Keith Goldfarb (bass guitar player), and Alex Melnick (the band's original drummer).
Turk and Lockhart were roommates in Santa Monica for a couple of years while they attended UCLA.