The entire process of making a head starts with the initial conceptual design.
The design calls for a particular character, and gives a brief description.
The concept artist, in this case, Leonard Boyarsky, takes the description
and generates some sketch art. These sketches are given to the clay modeller,
Scott Rodenhizer, who creates a clay "bust" with the rough features,
which is then baked to harden it.
This bust is translated into a set of numbers describing the 3D model via
a digitizing arm by Geoff Gregor and Erik Jamison.
They bring the basic 3D information into Lightwave, a software package to create
3D images, and clean it up. More 3D objects, such as hair, eyebrows,
ears are created and added. Texture maps are generated to give the fine detail,
and the model is always being checked over during all stages of creation. Finally
, once the model is approved, it has to be animated. Each head will have between
220-300 frames of animation to cover the various emotional states, phonemes and transition animations.
The entire process takes 6-8 weeks per head, and that's without the lip-synching that we will be doing!
Head Stuff
One of the technologically cool things in GURPS Fallout is the rendered heads used for major characters.
This screen shows some of the various stages a head goes through during the development cycle.
![[Head]](images/smlhead.gif)
to return to the credits.
