Eurographics PhD Award – Ruben Wiersma

Ruben Wiersma receiving the Eurographics PhD Award

Photo from the EG 2026 award ceremony showing Ruben Wiersma receiving the Eurographics PhD Award

Winner of the Computer Graphics Forum 2026 Cover Image Contest

Dennis Bukenberger - TU Munich - A golden sea turtle glides through the water, its shell rendered as a striking blueish diamond. The carapace is represented as an unfoldable low-poly triangle mesh, generated via a feature-preserving simplification that balances visual approximation with coarsening constraints. Starting on a dense surface, the method strategically places new vertices along dominant features, ensuring well-shaped triangles and consistent edge lengths for fabrication. Unfoldability is achieved by coupling the coarsening process with an automatically updated cut graph, which selects low-saliency seams to allow flattening without overlaps. The result preserves the shell's global shape and local geometric features (concavities, convexities, ridges, and valleys) while producing fabrication-ready geometry. The image was composited using Blender and rendered with Cycles.

Eurographics PhD Award – Ruben Wiersma

International Conference on Geometric Modeling and Processing (GMP 2026)

Spanish Computer Graphics Conference (CEIG’26)

Workshop on Visualization Play, Games, and Activities 2026

VisGap’26 – The Gap between Visualization Research and Visualization Software

GDxDR 2026: Bridging Graph Drawing and Dimensionality Reduction