How We Got Here

Over the past few years, CAVE Academy has helped a number of universities, colleges and training providers with CG and VFX Training. This has been in the form of one-off Masterclasses, for modules, and sometimes all-year CG training.

Whether a standalone session or a longer body of training, we’ve always taught students the ‘CAVE‘ way, that is by pushing our naming conventions, how we deal with projects and data, our asset and shot workflows, and so on. All of this we are gradually documenting on our Wiki, so the backbone of our training is freely available. The overall aim being that we standardise much of the foundational training content in the field of Computer Graphics.

On the whole, we have found that we are more than often asked to return to run additional sessions and provide extra support to students as they progress through their academic course.

However, what we’ve found by working with numerous institutes is that there is usually a mis-match in what is being taught internally and the requirements of industry.

Building Partnerships

So moving forwards, we are looking to work more closely with educational institutes and incorporate our training courses and curricula into their overall design via Academic Partnerships. We are looking to do this by making our online pre-recorded content available, along with hosting online and in-person workshops.

CAVE has a growing library of online pre-recorded courses to help support your students and tutors by allowing them to expand their knowledge in their chosen area of expertise, or if they are looking to further their understanding of other departments. Much of the training is connected to our Wiki and general teaching philosophy, so their is no disconnect between our online and in-person training.

We would also provide our datasets, so teachers and students can follow along and educational institutes would have access to high-end VFX and AAA game content.

By doing this, students will receive a more consistent and up-to-date education and training. And for the academic institutes, as we would be providing the datasets, training material and so on, you would not have to spend time creating and gathering your own material. You would be using the highest quality scan data, film plates, grey, chrome, colour chart reference, and so on.

At CAVE, we are constantly capturing data, so we are not looking to use one dataset for forever. Instead, we’ll be looking to provide new data on a bi-yearly basis (or sooner where possible). And we’d have numerous props, hero digi-double datasets, shots and so on. As a result, there’ll be a variety of data provided.

As we cannot be onsite full-time for multiple educational institutes, we’ll be encouraging staff development too by running teacher training workshops. This is to ensure the internal academic teaching team is familiar with the data and the latest workflows and methodologies for creating high-end results.

Sharing ideas and workflows is important, so we’ll be encouraging this as much as possible. We’ll additionally provide a small number of in-person or online sessions for your students too throughout the year (1 day per term/per academic institute).

You can think of CAVE as an extension of your training team, but again, we cannot be onsite all day, every day, and it is important that we state that we are not offering full-time in-person support as part of this package. If, however, you are looking for additional longer form on-site support, we are more than happy to discuss this.

Our aim is to provide as much support as we can to ensure your students are provided with the best education and ready for the workplace, and your teaching team are well prepped to deliver this.

We look forward to continuing our Partnerships with you.

Questions

If you would like to find out how CAVE can support your institute, please do get in touch either directly or using the form below.