So yesterday I had a chance to catch up with my old teacher and friend, Diego Maia, as he stopped by Sao Paulo on a visit as he's been giving various workshops around town. For those who don't know, Diego works with various top of the line artists and for some game design studios, such as Joe Madureira, in his new game Darksiders and Aaron Simms, for the upcoming film Clash of the Titans.

Diego showed us - a modest crowd in a relatively small space - quite a few of his designs, showing his humble beginnings in drawing and sketching in Fortaleza to the latest tutorial he's been cooking up for a CG website, based on aquatic beings fusing with humans. It's refreshing to see someone so deep in the industry actually showing how he began, and criticizing earlier work, but still holding it very dear to their heart. Among the current work he's been doing, he showed his awesome Captain America piece done for last year's ComiCon challenge.

The cream of the pie was surely his contribution to Darksiders, the demon lord Vulgrim - even though the site doesn't do him justice. It's an incredible looking piece, with layers of special textures that make things pop up, with simulations of silk fabrics to boot. It's hard to believe, but that's a low polygon count model, that with dedicated shading and texturing, looks awesome. He also worked on one of the angels in the game, but the final art is still not revealed. That game is looking amazing, a buy for me, surely.

His work on Clash of the Titans is very hush-hush at the moment, so there isn't much to tell. On the other hand, just getting to see my friend after so many months was great, even if I was already kind of beat by the time his talk started - my cIass was early in the morning and the talk began at around 8:30 PM, I still had a blast.

If any of you got interest at Diego's work, check out his blog, there are examples there of how versatile he is, and how he recommends every person with interest in character design to be.