*repeats the above message*
Characters are especially hard, because they have to actually look convincing, its all good when your making box's and crates, but characters need extremely detailed textures with a lot of fine work, if you are going to paint them, you literally have to draw reality onto your texture. Modelling is the same, human (and creature) anatomy can be very difficult and to top it off, as bond said, you will need to optimize the mesh for the animation process so there is no ripping, this and a clean polygon flow alongside complicated anatomy is rather baffling sometimes. in some cases it can often be best to go off and study the human body for a while, even the basics.
of course you could always resort to something like poser, however i can guarantee you will never get the model that YOU want, if you want something perfect, it takes the person you perceives it to create it
