G'day, This is not a tutorial as such, it is simply a few things to think about before, during and after you have modeled your character.

Before desiging your character you will need the right tools, a program to make your 3D models, and a program to make your 3D games. These two programs are often the same one. A really good (*free!*) 3D moddeling/game creation program avalible on every platform imaginable is Blender http://www.blender.org. It is a bit daunting at first with it's not conventional and keyboard shortcut based interface, but you will soon never want to go back to another 3D program again (It took me a while). Once you have mastered the basics you are ready to start on your character.

When designing a character in realtime 3D severel things must be considered:

* The model of the character has to have much less polygons than if is was a model to be used in pre-rendered graphics. This is becase unlike pre-rendered graphics your model has to be rendered on the fly at least 24 times each second for it to look passable.

* The model's textures also have to be smaller and used more efficiantly. A lot can be done with some good textures, they can turn a ok or semi-ok model into a close to photo-real or cool looking graphic. Also games using Open-GL have to use textures whose size is a divisible by 16. So 128 x 256 would be ok but 120 x 250 would not be. This is usually not a very big problem but is something that still has to be considered. Also some programs seem to compenstate for this automatically by resizing your textures to correct sizes.

* Your character should be easily reconisable, even in silloette, if it is then you are on the right track to a good character design.

* The best way to animate your character is using a skelatal animation system. This consisits of building a skeleton of your character which deforms the models mesh. You are basically animating the character from the inside out. All the latest games use this system and it is knocks previous animation techniques for a six.

* Use a tutorial on walking and running animation to help you create good looking walk/run cycles. These will give a lot character to your models and bring them to life.

Here http://home.graffiti.net/bluebirdcartoon/example.zip is a simple example of a Realtime 3D Character created by Alex Scobell and moddeled by me. The model is ok, the textures passable and the walking animation pretty good (well I'm impressed by it). To find out more about this character go here http://home.graffiti.net/bluebirdcartoon/

Thats all I have to say at the moment although I could go on...