Head swap

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Head swapping is the act of removing the head from an animated character and replacing it with a different one. This is usually done for one of two reasons: cost and memory constraints (on video game consoles).

Artwork is expensive to produce, so by recycling the characters body and only having to draw a new head, studios can save time and money. Early game consoles also had quite limited amounts of memory and storage space for games, so by reusing the body, several characters could be produced with only minimal extra memory requirements. This technique is closely linked to the more common palette swap.

Perhaps the most famous use of the head swap is in Capcom's Street Fighter series. It is used to distinguish between what fans call "Shotokan fighters" or "Shotoclones" (Shotokan being the name used to describe these characters' fighting style in the early English localization of the series, although technically incorrect). This type of head swap is different from other head swaps in that it is used together with the palette swap to differentiate between these similar characters. Characters of this type that exhibit the head swap include Ryu, Ken (see above), Akuma, Dan, and Sean.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion uses a similar technique in order to create the variety of characters necessary to fill the large area the game is set in. Although its characters are three dimensional, it uses sets of predefined bodies and combines them with heads randomly generated from its character customization program.