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Simon Cowell’s haircut, NOW in FULL3D

Tony — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:49:28 +0000

Even though lots of people don’t want to admit it, but hey, we all love American Idol, and listening to “some” of Simon Cowell’s insults is like being told off by your older, teenage brother – you know he’s “kind of” right, but he certainly can do with some sugarcoating. Once in awhile, you would like to get back at the mean brother of yours, let it be a practical joke or whatever. Since we can’t just walk up to Simon Cowell and flip him a bird, Flight of the Conchords’ style, we can make fun of him in 3D animated American Idol parody and broadcast it all over the internet and get a moral victory.

Simon Cowell's haircut as seen on American Idol

So what is Simon Cowell’s most recognisable feature? It’s that random looking, short-centre-split-on-top and number-2-side-and-back thingy you call hair. By saying that, we have already identified two highlights (or lowlights) of the haircut: a shorter than usual centre parting, and number 2 all around the side and back of the head.

Let’s fire up Blender and get modelling. Here is a character mesh that I already prepared, and I start from the centre of the head, and create a flat piece of hair flowing outwards, ending with a triangle, so the hair has a cartoony look, for comedic effect for the parody.

The beginning of Simon Cowell's haircut

Then add a bit of volume by subdividing the hair along the flow of the hair and move the vertices away from the head.

Add some volume to the parting hair on Simon's head

Then line the hair in pairs flowing in opposite directions on top of the head to create the shorter than usual centre parting of hair.

Simon's parting hair completed

Now it’s time to make the number 2 haircut on the side and rear of the head. Line parallel pieces of hair flowing down the hair and place them just beneath the centre parting we have just created. This time, the volume of the hair should be thinner, as we want to make sure it resembles the top heavy look.

The start of Simon's number 2 haircut

Continue to add the thinner hair pieces around the head, all parallel to each other. It’s likely one layer of the hair will not cover the whole head, so just continue to make another layer underneath the previous one until the head is covered. Take special care of the sideburns to keep the hairstyle looking natural.

Simon Cowell's completed haircut

This is the final textured haircut as rendered in our inhouse rendering engine.

Simon Cowell looking puzzled in 3D

Check out one of the American Idol parodies we made about Simon Cowell on voovees.com. It was written and directed by Overman at Zarathustra Studios.

Congratulations to Phil, ‘Sweet Nothingness’ wins Animatu

Billy — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:08:17 +0000

Animatu, the international digital animation festival based in Portugal, is a relatively prestigious panel-judged animation festival for the machinima community. So it was a great joy to get an email from our good friend Phil Rice (aka Overman), with a big ‘YAY’ telling us that he took home the top prize in the machinima category yesterday.

This guy is unstoppable. In a good way.

You can see the brilliantly made ‘Sweet Nothingness’ here:

Sweet Nothingness from Phil Rice on Vimeo.

It was an honour that Phil chose to use ZenCub3d to do this project in, he made full use of the little quirky charm that the ZenCub3d characters have, the facial animations were so brilliantly constructed that they essentially carrying the whole story with no dialogue. Amazing.

We were nominated for the same category last year, for our parking warden animation, but it was no where as nicely put together as ‘Sweet Nothingness’.

Once again, big congratulations on the win, you deserver every bit of it mate.

A Wii bit of animated fun

Billy — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 06:46:10 +0000

A bunch of the guys in our office building had a game of Wii bowling today, so we made a parody of that just for the heck of it, with some familiar faces no less.

Fun times.

“Bite Sized Love”

Billy — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:36:33 +0000

Now that the results for the regional finals are out, we found out that our ‘Bite Sized Love’ wasn’t in it… Oh well, I think being a team of non-filmy people, we’ve done great already.

Not being in the regional finals means we can show our short right now, so without further adu, here’s ‘Bite Sized Love’

Note: this is a slightly edited version to the one that we shown at the public screening previously, we’ve added a little extra easter-egg after the ending credits.

I must say though, the film look alot darker watching this on YouTube than on my computer, hmmm… For 48’s submission we had to submit a film in PAL which is 720×576 @ 25 fps, which if I remember correctly YouTube doesn’t like too much…