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Inspired Digital artists and inspirational figures unite in Las Vegas for Autodesk’s first CAVE conference

We attend Autodesk’s CAVE conference, look at collaborative art projects and nose about Will Murai’s São Paulo studio.

The dust has settled on Autodesk’s first CAVE conference, and Chris Cheung, the mastermind behind it, is finding it hard to explain what exactly just happened.

Ostensibly it was the first creative event to run at the front end of the business-driven Autodesk University Conference, in Las Vegas’s grand Venetian hotel on 1-2 December 2013. It was also Chris’s personal attempt to offer digital creatives something uniquely engaging, whatever their field.

“After the success of SketchBook Pro, people formed communities. That led to smaller talks when people like Scott Robertson or CB Cebulski were in town,” the Autodesk product line manager explains. “Even though people had seen these guys at

I would have gone to an event like this if it had existed when I was starting out

comic conventions, they never really connected with them on an intellectual level. That seemed important.”

From the pre-event party where ticket holders saw John Cleese, Neil Gaiman, deviantART CEO Angelo Sotira and Bobby Chiu trading stories over drinks, the spirit of the event was set as open and inclusive. Lorne Lanning’s opening seminar covered his “lifelong fascination with corruption and irony” mixed with entertainment in his Oddworld game franchise.

Neil Gaiman spoke of the power of understanding one’s imagination. “It’s enormously important,” he told ImagineFX. “This is the stuff people don’t tell you. I was lucky because I had punk and the attitude of ‘you do something by doing it’. That fuelled me. But passing that on to another generation is extremely important. I would have gone to an event like this if it had existed when I was starting out.” Before the finishing party in the hangarsized main hall, Monty Python’s John Cleese was still making final tweaks to his speech, admitting to ImagineFX that, “I’d much rather speak at a seminar like this, to open minds, than shoot a film.” While Python fans will no doubt wish for the latter, a growing number of digital creatives should be looking to Chris’s next CAVE experiment.

Discover more about Autodesk CAVE here: www.autodeskcave.com.

Lena Le drew this composite CAVE-inspired digital painting, which provided a backdrop to Chris Cheung’s introductory talk. Shine a light: the first CAVE conference kicked off in the not-so-dark Las Vegas. Calum Alexander Watt drew this painting over...

CAVE attendees were asked to submit short character descriptions and vote for the best three. They were then drawn by pro artists. Bobby Chiu sunk his teeth into this one! Syd Mead put in a rare appearance, and an even rarer process breakdown of...