9000 attendees from 74 countries, taking over four floors of a major Vegas hotel for four days, it's been going on for 16 years...and we're just now hearing about it. Autodesk University is a much bigger production than we--or most of the design community--realized, and it's a bit overwhelming.

This year's installment of AU is remarkable versus previous years in several ways, the first being a much stronger focus on issues of sustainability: practically every segment represented in the class catalog (construction, design leadership, civil engineering, ID, etc.) features a session or two on going green, and there's a tip o' the cap to Freitag in the form of shwag bags partially constructed from last year's AU banners.

Autodesk also looks to be embracing its creative side with a little more heart this year, having more than doubled the number of ID-oriented sessions, and making a bigger deal out of process-oriented technologies like rapid prototyping (though we're a teensy bit skeptical that Spore figure was designed in AutoCAD).

>>View all AU2008 coverage here.