Tamas Varady, the 2026 Pierre Bézier Award Recipient
- Personal Website: https://3dgeo.iit.bme.hu/
The 2026 SMA Bézier Award is awarded to Professor Tamas Varady in recognition of his outstanding contributions to geometric modelling, reverse engineering, constrained surface fitting and multi-sided surfacing.
Tamas Varady worked at the Computer and Automation Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 1976 to 2003, where he led the Geometric Modelling Laboratory for 18 years. In 2003, he joined Raindrop Geomagic Inc. as CTO/CTA, responsible for the development of their flagship reverse engineering product, Geomagic Studio. He returned to academia in 2010, joining the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, where he currently serves as Professor Emeritus.
He was one of the early pioneers who investigated the integration of B-rep Solid Modeling and Parametric Surfacing techniques. His research subsequently focused on generating complex blending surfaces. He notably promoted the use of setback-type vertex blending to resolve topologically complex configurations where multiple fillets meet, a method now standard in CAD systems.
Together with Dr. Ralph Martin, he is widely credited with formalizing Reverse Engineering as a separate research discipline. Their foundational 1997 paper is the most cited work in RE research (Google citation index: 2283). They established the standard pipeline used by nearly every commercial system today: Data Capture → Mesh-processing → Segmentation → Classification → Surface Fitting → Constraint enforcement → B-rep Model Building. Varady and his colleagues published highly cited papers on each phase of the above pipeline.
A defining chapter of his research is to produce “perfected” CAD models, i.e. a methodology to fit multiples of surfaces while enforcing crucial engineering constraints – such as parallelism, perpendicularity, concentricity, symmetry. This allows to reconstruct the original design intent. New results include automatic surface fitting with weak control points, efficient and faithful fitting of conventional surface geometries, parameterizing trimmed patches with labeling, recognizing and setting global constraints and constraining free-form curves and surfaces.
Tamas Varady has published extensively on multi-sided patches and curve-network-based design. His first essential contribution on overlap patches (1991) was later followed by various transfinite schemes, including the generalization of the classical Coons patch for arbitrary n-sides and various ribbon based methods with special parameterizations and blending techniques, that ensure G1/G2 continuity across complex networks.
Regarding control point based surfacing in 2016 Varady et al. published an elegant scheme to generalize the classic quadrilateral Bézier patch for n sides. First convex polygonal domains were used, then an essential step forward was to introduce multiply-connected domains with curved boundaries, that led to the Generalized Bézier (GB) and Generalized B-spline (GBS) patches allowing topological flexibility for surface design. Recent work includes surface modeling with constrained ribbons, and setting control structures for the interior of GB and GBS patches.
Tamas Varady and his colleagues have written useful surveys for the geometric modeling community; covering n-sided patch generation (1987), parametric blending methods (1994), reverse engineering (1997) and a recent one on genuine multi-sided patches (2024). For many years, he served on the Editorial Boards of the CAD Journal and CAGD, and on several conference program committees. He received the SMA Pioneers Award in 2016 and the John Gregory Memorial Award in 2017.