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, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76, every NPC (with a few exceptions) has at least a few voiced lines, so "talking heads" no longer appear.

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.

Behind the scenes
"After the team worked out exactly what it was after, a sculptor made a clay head that fit the bill. From there, the artists took the completed head and carefully studied it to see what parts of the face needed to be animated most in order to create a realistic final image. Using a Faro Space Arm and the VertiSketch software, the team digitized the head, and then used theLightWave modeling software to do necessary geometric corrections. Next, texture maps were created in Photoshop and laid onto the modeled head. Finally, the art team began working on the animation."

- NG preview


 * Talking heads were proposed during the game's development by Leonard Boyarsky. Most of them were painstakingly copied into the digital format from clay models by Scott Rodenhizer. Originally, Fallout was supposed to have 40-50 talking heads, but the average time to do one head, 8 weeks, was too time consuming and was pushed done to just 21.