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.

The Twilight Movie Poster

Twilight, the books that made SO much sales that 16% of all books sold in America in the first three months of 2009 were the four twilight books (source), and not to mention the movie that took in $70.6 million at the box office at opening weekend, with a   had been a massive success, and we decided it would be fun to make it in 3d animated form for you guys to play with on Voovees.com.

Our Twilight Voovees Poster

I mean, after zombies, why not vampires? Right?

For the next few posts I’ll talk a bit about how we went about making the twilight voovees, starting with this post focused on the star vampire of the twilight universe, Edward Cullen.

Edward is a very cool character, the ‘Lion’ of the Edward-Bella Lion-Lamb relationship. We want to show him off as the cool kid in school that have just a bit TOO much attitude.

Edward Cullen - Wireframe and Action Shot

Defining characteristics of the character is the greased-up hair style, and the borderline-evil-but-wow-so-handsome-I-don’t-care facial features.

Those of you with the keener eye would have noticed that the character looks dramatically different to the ZenCub3d characters that we had, and you’d be right. Yes, we have new characters, and we’re making more of them.

Many faces of Edward Cullen

Here are some expressions of what the 3D Edward looks like, we took a little Robert Pattinson and added a bit more ‘vampiric twist’ to it (though without the pointy teeth).

It was a great fun making our first twilight parody Science Class, and you can make your own parody of the scene.

Here are some of the good parodies of this scene that were made:

Garlic Paper Shuriken

Whip Lash Mania

The hairdresser within

Lucy Makes an Entrence

Lote Not(e)

Walks Like Teen Spirit

Acting is following cues

Filming with Props

Captain Green Attempts to Save the Planet

At the end I’ll leave you with some comparison shots between the actual movie and the parody.

Edward sitting alone in science class (movie)

Edward sitting alone in science class (parody)

Edward's reaction just after Bella's scent blown on his face (movie)

Edward's reaction just after Bella's scent blown on his face (parody)

Edward's close up after Bella sat down next to him (movie)

Edward's close up after Bella sat down next to him (parody)

voovees.com, where you as a user can replace existing dialogues from various animations, and add your own twists to it.

Following the philosophy among tech startups that, “Release Early, Release Often“, “if you‘re not embarrassed by the first release of your product, you‘ve released too late “, we want to put something out there as soon as the gist of where we plan to go is glimpsing through, even if that means the idea of letting people have the chance to exercise their criticisms on virtually everything makes the hair in the back of our necks stand up.

Even at this early stage, and even if just among ourselves, we are having lots of fun making parodies and spoofs with it. We hope to see yours own customized parodies and spoofs published up there too.

The site will be periodically updated with new animations that you can remix, and we certainly are making small incremental changes to make using the site more fun and entertaining. Your suggestions and constructive criticisms will only help us in creating a better site for you.

On a slightly different note, over the last few months of “stealth mode” development, I’ve been asked many times what the fate of ZenCub3d would be, that many people misses the quirky small animation engine. Amidst rumor and speculations thus far, I can confirm to you guys right now, that the core technology behind ZenCub3d is being repurposed for the next phase of what voovees.com will become.