My Mess with Fallout’s Talking Heads
So, I got this idea stuck in my head a while back. You know those creepy, weird talking heads from the old Fallout games? Yeah, those. I thought, “Hey, I should try making something like that myself.” Looked cool, seemed like a fun little project.
First thing I did was look up how the original folks at Interplay actually made them. Turns out, it wasn’t simple. They used sculpted physical heads, motion capture stuff, and some real early, clunky 3D software. Way more involved than I figured. Made me respect those old games a bit more, honestly.
Okay, plan B. No way I was sculpting physical heads. I thought, “Modern tools gotta make this easier, right?” So I grabbed Blender, found some free head models online. Seemed simple enough. Just gotta rig it, make it talk.
Wrong. Rigging was a nightmare. Getting the mouth shapes, the ‘phonemes’ or whatever they call them, to look even halfway decent took ages. And even when I got something moving, it looked… bad. Stiff. Like a robot trying to chew gum. Nothing like that weird, uncanny feel of the originals. It just looked like cheap CG.
- Spent hours tweaking vertex weights.
- Tried different animation techniques.
- Watched a bunch of tutorials, still couldn’t nail it.
Got pretty frustrated. This “simple project” was eating up my evenings. Then I thought, “What about AI?” There’s all this new AI stuff that can animate faces from audio or whatever. Maybe that’s the shortcut?
Downloaded some tools, tried feeding them audio clips and static images. The results were… something else. Sometimes hilarious, mostly just weird. Faces warping in bizarre ways, mouths flapping out of sync. Still not the Fallout vibe. More like a deepfake gone wrong. More tweaking, more weird results. It felt like wrestling an octopus.
That’s when the ‘fallout’ kinda hit me. This wasn’t about just finding the right button to press. The originals had a specific look because of the limitations and techniques of their time. Trying to perfectly copy it with totally different tools felt like missing the point. It was a ton of work for something that just wouldn’t look right.
So, I kinda gave up on making a perfect copy. Decided instead to just make my version, inspired by it. Played around with some textures, added some scanline filters, tried to make the lighting look a bit grimier, more low-fi. Focused less on perfect lip-sync and more on getting that slightly ‘off’ feeling.
In the end, I got something. It’s definitely not a Fallout talking head. It’s my janky, home-brewed version. Took way longer than expected, and the result is nowhere near professional. But hey, I learned a lot. Mostly learned that those old game devs were wizards, and sometimes recreating the past is harder than just making something new. It was a messy process, lots of trial and error, but that’s how you figure things out, I guess.
