ipo's and parenting

I believe the best way to get the "dynamic 3d avatar" is to have a "fake person" that is attached to a real (invisible) parent, which parent has dynamics associated with it.

Also, it appears that you CAN set object arbitrarily in Blender (see the addObject2.blend example) by using "instantaddobject" and that instantreplacemesh also exists, BTW. Then you can change it more easily on the fly. (call "getlastcreated object" [?] immediately after calling that).