I want just a really basic character for a short video, just an intro. How would I go about doing this? Just a basic body shape which I could do a simple unwrap on for simple textures.

Then animate it basically. For example something like this:


I don't see how that biped has solid skin.

Is there some aspect of modeling, rigging, texturing, animating that you're asking about here that I'm not getting, or are you asking for a start-to-finish tutorial of all of this?

Because Max has those sorts of tutorials.

The screenshot is showing the bones, the actual mesh that is rigged is most likely hidden in that scene. The fact that you're missing this makes me think you need to go through the fundamentals tutorials included with the software for animation and rigging.

Well, I didn't think of checking for hidden meshes at the time lol. But I thought there may have been some settings which made the bones solid.

If it is an actual mesh then that is fair enough, I can do that

Yea, more than likely its hidden and the "render hidden geometry" option is checked on.

However there was a system similar to how you are thinking that was done. Where simple shapes are use to generate a base geometry, skin and even physics. It was used in Kung-Fu Panda but that is 100% completely proprietary and no one outside of the studio has access to it...