Several ideas and experiments are presented for the creation and realistic animation of three-dimensional scenes involving human beings conscious of their environment. The various approaches should allow the intelligent creation of human beings using prototypes to generate their animation, based on mechanics, artificial intelligence and robotics. The authors discuss the problems involved in three major steps of the simulation of human beings: the creation of the human shapes, the motion of the human skeleton, and the deformation of the surfaces. Several examples are presented illustrating positional constraints, dynamics, behavioural animation and finite element theory