ThinkingCactus Blog What's going on at ThinkingCactus

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.

We like to thank all the people that have signed up to our phase 2 private beta, and we’ll update you guys further when the beta begins.

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.

Embed Code

You can now embed voovees parodies on your own blogs! Yay!

Much like how you would use YouTube’s embeding code, you just click in the ‘Embed Code’ textbox, copy the text, and paste it in your own blog, and that will do it!

There may still be some issues with this feature, but we think it’s mature enough that you guys can play with it. Right now it might be a little flaky with a few WYSIWYG editors that comes with blogging systems (I’m experiencing it on WordPress), that toggling between ‘Visual’ mode and ‘HTML’ mode will change the embedding text, so make sure that you do the embedding inside ‘HTML’ view right before you post. Also, right now the embedding always happens at 640 by 360 (YouTube’s HiRes format size), we may have more options later on.We’ll try our best to iron out these issues. If you have any thoughts about these let us know by leaving a comment below.

But otherwise, embed to your heart’s content!

Voovees parody: “Embed Me Now!” by billyc. Make your own parody of this!

The recent ‘Taylor Swift v.s Kanye West‘ incident at the VMAs was one of the most widely reported incidents in recent entertainment history, prompting massive public outcry by blogs and twitter, and ultimately tears on Jay Leno’s show.

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.

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.

Get Latest Parodies From Voovees.com on Twitter

If you want to get notified as new parodies are being made on Voovees.com, now you can easily get them delivered to you by following us on twitter!

Oh yeah, by the way, you can also follow members of the ThinkingCactus team on twitter here, here and here.

Up, up and tweet away!

Many of you no doubt already know ZenCub3d’s development have slowed, and
probably many of you noticed that we’ve been promoting Voovees.com. The cleverest among you have asked us whether the development of ZenCub3d and Voovees.com are actually linked, and finally, we can confirm this to you with a big fat, YES.

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.

Once again, a big thanks to all the guys and gals that participated in our Pick-Up Line competition last week, we have the results out now!

Most viewed award – Accident by pearlpower, came out of no where to grab the top spot with 138 views by the end of the competition, likely good promotion work in the background.

Highest rated award – My God You’re Gorgeous by redoptick, who had a +3 rating by the end of competition, actually just edging out I am what I am by elmo, who also had a +3 rating but a slightly lower view count.

Unfortunately we had to disqualify quite a few entries, generally because of non-compliance with voovees.com’s Terms of Use, which was unfortunate.

The winners will be notified by email, congratulations once again, to the winners of the competition!

As the competitions that we were running come to a close, *almost* so does one of our other experimental things. We’ve previous planned to put three twilight parodies up on voovees to let people play with, and this is the last one.We’ve certainly saved the best for last, there are a lot more action in this one than in the previous parodies.

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?