Hello I'm a modeller

[Hermoor]

Well the primitive shapes one can choose from is:
Cube
Cylinder
Plane

The best primitive to start of with for almost all organic models is the cylinder. It already has the basic shape. Have you ever played spore maybe? In that game you pull out a spine and a cylinder is formed and you can scale the cylinder in places to get a body.

This is basically what you do with the body arms and legs. You just extrude a cylinder and fix it's width. This works great for low poly game models, with high poly models where much more detail is needed and the texture won't define the shape as much as the model. It's better to start from scratch, that is starting with a plane and try to model everything vertex by vertex muscles in places etc.

For low poly models this isn't necessary since most of the detail comes out of the texture. So just extrude cylinders for arms legs and body then pull the vertexes around to form basic body proportions and muscles etc. Then connect it all together, the only parts I modelled individually on this model was the hands and the skull. They are detailed complexed shapes that needs more work than a tube like body with different width.

One can use a basic model like this and instead of modeling all the detail yourself you can sculpt it. Then retopo the sculpt with a plane. The sculpt can later be used for a normal map. This is how many people do it in modern games that require normal maps. I tried to do a sculpt and a normal map on the panther but I failed because I had already done the texture at this point. And the texture was so dark it was hard to notice the normal map.

This is a bit of a pain though, and if it's not required one can only make a diffuse texture and not a normal map. Anyway hope that was a good enough answer, I started texturing him a few min ago. Current progress

One could make the model appear in a movie or something, but then you would have to model every shape that is on that body. Currently all the muscles and the rib cage on his body is a texture. That would have to be modeled then given individual textures. Often layers of textures...I think the Balrog in lord of the rings had something like 1000 layers of textures on it. It would maybe take a week to create the model but getting that realism takes much longer...anyway for games cylinders are best to use and normal maps if necessary