as you already know, a character model needs a mesh (model) and an armature (skeleton). remember my pinkbox character model? well that's probably a good starting point. you can download the blend file for that by clicking here. in this blend you will find a model that has been uvmapped (had it's faces mapped onto a texture) and a basic armature with only one bone. right click the mesh, then press f9 to bring up the editing menu and take a look under the "modifiers" tab. you'll see that the mesh has an "armature" modifier, this means that it is attached to an armature, so when the armature moves the mesh moves. now it's ready to be exported to a game model.
the game model format i'll be using in this example is zym. this is made by exporting your model and animations to halflife2 smd files, which are then compiled with a program called zmodel into a zym file ready for the game to use. firstly, you'll need the nexuiz smd export script. click here to download. put this in the folder that blender uses for it's scripts, restart blender and it should show up in the file -> export list as Nexuiz (.smd). select both the mesh and the armature and then run this script twice. the first time select "static mesh" and make a file called mesh.smd. the second time select "animaions sequence" and make a file called anim.smd. you now have enough files to make a non-animated character model.
next there is a lot of messing around with config files and making pk3s. to avoid this unnecessary pain i've made a little folder full of tricks to automate it for you. click to download. unpack this folder and put your mesh.smd and anim.smd into it. then run the build.sh script and if all goes well (and you are running linux) it should make a little pk3 file for you.
once you get this working then you'll be a lot closer to making your own character models. good luck.
