User:Jelin Frone/sandbox

Brian Wyvill is a Canadian computer scientist and author who is currently a professor emeritus at the University of Victoria. He was a vice-president of ACM SIGGRAPH from 2013 to 2020. He is regarded as a pioneer in the field of implicit modelling for computer graphics and animation. His most prominent contributions include developing the first implicit surface polygonizer with his brother Geoff Wyvill and the BlobTree, a single unified structure for representing both the topology and geometry of complex implicit models.

Education and career
After attending the University of London and earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1970, Wyvill completed his doctorate in computer graphics in 1975 from University of Bradford. Wyvill was soon after granted a Research Fellowship at the Royal College of Art where he helped build a computer animation system for System Simulation that was used in the 20th Century Fox film, Alien. This film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effect, along with may other awards and nominations. During the production of this film, he gave himself an on-screen credit through one of the animations he worked on in the film using his nickname "Blob". He worked on this film's animations at the Atlas Computer Laboratory in Harwell, Oxfordshire.

He then spent four years as an industrial consultant working with organizations including the Home Office and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Subsequently, he became a professor at the University of Calgary in 1981 and held this position until 2006. During this time, he along with his brother Geoff Wyvill and other students and researchers, built the Graphicsland research group, which later became Graphics Jungle when Przemek Pusinkiewicz joined the lab and added his computer generated plants. In 2007, Wyvill began serving as a faculty member at the University of Victoria, where he held a Canada Research Chair for seven years, and continues to work with the university in the computer science department as of 2021.

Also in 2007, he began the Canadian Eurographics chapter and its first conference was the same year in Banff, Alberta.

Research work
Wyvill wrote his thesis, "An Interactive Graphics Language: The Development of a General Purpose Machine-independent Graphics Language and Its Implementation Within a Small Machine Environment", in 1975. With over 100 academic publications as an author, Wyvill has contributed significant research in the computer science field in computer animation and more specifically, implicit modelling.

Along with his brother Geoff in 1980s, he introduced the concept of soft objects and created the first polygonizer for iso-surfaces in volume data and implicit models. Later, Wyvill and Kees van Overveld published a method known as Shrinkwrap, which uses a local Lipschitz constant to find the minimum edge length to ensure there is no sign change in the field.

In 1997, he co-authored Introduction to Implicit Surfaces, a textbook that covers many of the fundamental applications of modern computer animations including implicit modelling and rendering, which has been cited over 1000 times. Also in the late 1990s, he developed an extension to the CSG tree, which is the data structure for representing solid three-dimensional animations, to include implicit models in the data structure. This extension is known as the BlobTree and has become a widely popular method for organizing data with implicit modelling. The BlobTree was used by Wyvill’s student, Ryan Schmidt to build the first interactive implicit BlobTree modeler, ShapeShop, published in 2005, that introduced a new method of inflating two-dimensional shapes and sketches into three-dimensional implicit volumes.

Awards and honors

 * Canada Research Chair (2007-2013)
 * 2011 Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award
 * 2012 Eurographics Fellow
 * 2019 Canadian Information Processing Society Hall of Fame, Honorary Fellow