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.

Final Call for Participation

As you know we’ve been calling for Private Beta Tester Singups, and at time of writing there are only 136 places left out of the 600 allocated spaces. We will be closing our signup before the end of the week, so if you’re interested in participating in the exclusive private beta, quickly let us know by visiting our signup page and drop us your email address. This may very well be your last chance to be one of the first people to try out our brand new toys.

And also, our biggest thanks to our friends for blogging about us. What’s on the horizon is going to be exciting, can’t wait.

And now, with the new ‘Taylor v.s Kanye Parody‘ video up on voovees.com, you get to parody the incident!

Taylor v.s Kanye Parody

One of our big time users elmo even parodied the recent 4chan-started ‘RIP Kanye West‘ hoax, which was trending on twitter for several days.

On a different note, this video is just the first of many collaboration effort between us here at ThinkingCactus and [the critically acclaimed award-winning] Phil Rice (aka Overman), there will definitely be more of these coming up, so stay tuned.

As you’re no doubt aware if you’ve been following this blog, voovees.com is currently a public site where everyone can make some basic dialogue changes to pre-made animations, and while ZenCub3d’s technology doesn’t currently have an active role in this, other than as the engine of choice to make these animations off site, that will change.

Voovees Phase 2 Coming Soon, Baby!

The current voovees.com is regarded as our ‘phase 1′ on our development vision, and with ‘phase 2′ looming on the horizon, we are granting users to a very limited, very exclusive close-beta sign up. First come, first serve.

While I won’t go into the details, I can tell you right now that ‘phase 1′ and ‘phase 2′ are VASTLY different.
Placing is very limited, so be in quick.

Sign yourself up at:
http://voovees.com/phase2signup/

When the private beta period starts, all of you that signed up with be notified how to get your beta user accounts.
After the private beta stage started, new user accounts will be obtained by invitation only, so it’s better to sign up now if you get the chance.

Once again, the sign up link is at:
http://voovees.com/phase2signup/

Current ZenCub3d and/or voovees.com phase 1 users do not automatically get entry into the closed beta, so it’s essential to sign up.

EDIT: due to popular demands, we’ve doubled our initial allocation from 300 to 600, and they are still going fast, so be in quick.

Twilight Parody vol.3 Poster

For better or for worse, this will be our last one about twilight (well, perhaps more after New Moon comes out anyway).

Moving on to other movies, watch this space…. Hmmm, where’s my old pile of DVD collections?

Also, definitely taking suggestions here, what movies / specific scenes that you’d like to parody?

We’ll tally up the votes and soon make an announcement on the winners.

Our frequent users ‘redoptick‘ is probably the user that made the most number of pickup-lines (professional pickup artist?), who even made a 4 part series within those entries. Ah, always entertaining.

We have over 70 entries so far, and among ourselves we’ve had several laughed-out-loud moments in the office just looking at them.

Click on top right link to view all parodies for that story

You can now access to all the parodies made for a particular story by clicking on the top right link from the frontpage, just in time for you to decide who want to vote for huh?

We invite everyone to go see all the pick-up line entries, and vote on whether you like them or not, even if you are not making pick-up lines yourself; if you did make an entry, invite your friends to come on and vote.

Go for it before the time runs out!

Voovees.com Pick-Up Line Competition

It was more intended to be a local competition that we’re running here in the always sunny Christchurch, New Zealand, the main cash prize being $100 in New Zealand currency, but since there are no rules against international entries, I don’t see why people around the world shouldn’t share their, perhaps local flavors of pick-ups, as I’m sure, guys failing to impress beautiful girls in public are truly experiences shared across the globe (well, perhaps less so in some socially-restrictive parts of the world, but you know what I mean). If you’d win as an international entry, well then, maybe you’d like some NZ currency for the next time you visit NZ, or we can PayPal you to equivalent value in your nominated currency (roughly US$74).

We already have some really funny entries up on the site, so what are you waiting for?

Extra information for parodies

Quick note: now on the frontpage of voovees.com, additional information about a parody, namely of which original story a parody was made from, is displayed under the parody name, in the right side bar. Hopefully that helps a little with navigating around the site.

We’ll keep posting even the littlest changes/improvements to the site as we add them, which at the current stage, we’ll probably be posting stuff on a daily basis.

What are you waiting for? Head over to voovees.com and post your own parodies.