Talking head

A talking head is a type of NPC in Fallout and Fallout 2. In these games, ordinary NPCs appear as normal game sprites in dialogues and have no voice; talking heads, in contrast, have fully animated, three-dimensional portraits, and fully voice-acted dialogue that has been lip-synched to the animation. In Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4, every NPC (with a few exceptions) has at least a few voiced lines, so "talking heads" no longer appear.

Talking heads was a Leonard Boyarsky's idea, but they were mostly implemented by Scott Rodenhizer. The process of creating a talking head included forming a clay head, which was then point-scanned to create a 3D model, which can be textured and lighted. This process usually took up to 8 weeks, with additional 2-3 months needed for animation. This was one of the reasons why only 21 characters in the first Fallout were given this treatment, instead of originally planned 40 to 50.

Some of the voices for the talking heads were produced by well-known actors, such as Richard Dean Anderson from MacGyver and Stargate SG-1, and Michael Dorn who is known as Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation.