It's called Autodesk University, and a large part of the experience are the classes. Once you register for the conference, you gain access to an online catalog of dozens of courses all designed to help you create more effectively.
The sheer breadth of classes is bananas, as Autodesk offers so many different products across so many industries. I met engineers, CAD guys, architects, materials experts, German people--I realize that's not a profession, I just forgot to ask them what they do--as well as construction-industry folks and one guy who introduced himself as "a gold mine designer. As in, I design gold mines." (I only spoke with him briefly, and afterwards regretted not asking him "Why do people always get trapped in coal mines and never gold mines?")
The broad range of attendees can admittedly make smalltalk tough; at one lunch I shared a table with an extremely cute female who told me she worked for a uranium mining company. I spent most of the meal moving my salad around while trying to think of polite questions to ask about uranium.
Anyways, back to the classes. I tried to locate every class I could that pertained to industrial designers and stuck my head in as many as I could.
Some were lectures, like the one run by Germany-based Creative Solutions expert Michal Jelinek, who showed how to use Alias, Showcase, and Mudbox to quickly generate concept drawings and reduce what he called "mouseclick kilometers;" others were hands-on labs run by guys like Autodesk's SketchBook Senior Product Manager Christopher Cheung (more on him later) and industrial designer Kyle Runciman, inviting you to follow along with them while they deftly executed drawings in SketchBook Designer and showed you shortcuts and tricks. Others were hands-on tutorials like the ones run by Tech Evangelist Shaan Hurley, who showed how to run AutoCAD on a Mac. Hurley offered these classes in two flavors: For those with AutoCAD experience but no Mac experience, and vice versa.
The hands-on labs and tutorials were pretty wicked because the classrooms come loaded with top-of-the-line machines. The Mac classes I sat in on had G5 towers, iMacs and 17-inch MacBook Pros you could choose from, all with high-end Wacom tablets and Magic Trackpads. Pretty bad-ass. (From what I understand, the PC-based labs come with high-end Dell and HP machines.)
The classes also come with printed handouts and downloadable PDFs that you'll save as valuable references for later. As a registered conference attendee I had access to all of these online, and I'm sorry I can't make them available for download here--a lot of the packets had proprietary information in them, for example excerpts from professional training manuals and "Learn Autodesk"-style books, sometimes with the authors even popping up in the classes.
Despite the broad range of attendees, I found plenty of classes beyond the drawing/rendering ones to interest the ID'er, for those of you who are weighing whether to attend next year. Some examples:
- Using Autodesk Inventor to Create Precision Sheet Metal Parts
- Digital Prototyping: A Case Study of Plastic Parts Design
- Injection Molding Warpage Prediction and Mold Correction
- Photo-Based Reality Capture: Turn Photographs into 3D Models
- Cross-Product Workflow for Industrial and Product Design
- Mudbox: Textures for Architecture and Design
- Brave New Mobile World: Creativity and Design on the Go
- Sustainable Design Techniques in Digital Prototyping
The list goes on and on.
The only minor gripe I had with the class set-up is that some of the descriptions were less than clear; for example I had to ask Hurley in person which Mac-AutoCAD class was which, as he was teaching two variants that had identical descriptions in the catalog.
Of five people I randomly asked--I know, I'm not winning a Pulitzer Prize for journalism here--only one reported similar confusion, an Australian engineer who said something like "the class descriptions were a bit confusing, mate." (It's possible I added the "mate" part in a subconscious Australianization of my memory of him, but I do clearly remember that he rode in on a kangaroo, then caught a boomerang he had hurled seconds earlier to incapacitate a wombat.)
I asked the Australian if he knows Core77's own Glen Jackson Taylor, since they are both Australian. He assured me he grew up across the street from Glen, but in retrospect I think he was patronizing me.