Plan for Andrew Nicholson

3D Human Character Generation

This is my first plan so take it easy and bear with me.

Im a third year student at Bolton University (UK) and i have landed one of Phil Carlisle's project's for this final year. I'll give you the project description:

Develop a working prototype system that allows for the evaluation of different techniques for the procedural creation of game avatars. This will involve creating some symbolic language ( a set of measurements of bone length and rest pose) as well as a method to apply "skin" to these bones. You will be able to demonstrate a working application that allows the user to interactively modify the base skeleton and generate an appropriate mesh from the skeleton pose. You will then hold a survey to evaluate the quality of the prototype under the different generation methodologies.

Im basically atacking it from the point of view of costs and time in game development (AAA and Indie development)
eg:
How long does it take or should it take to model a low poly human character using normal modelling techniques? (3ds max, milkshape etc)
What is the average cost or what you get paid for that model?

Providing the models I generate from this application are of a decent quality, I could then compare timescales and then calculate overall costs to game development. Im not trying to put artists/modellers out of a job, just seeing if this approach would save time and money?

I know that most companys dont like giving this sort of information away, so if you have anything covering this area or you could point me in the right direction it would be of great interest to me: ThankYou