Are there well known and practical methods for getting collision detection between two animated models/meshes down to the polygon level? I know that I could easily keep models from walking into each other by using bounding volumes... However, If I then want to go to the next level and see if the polygons are actually colliding I can't think of how I would go about doing that... My initial thought was to just test for intersection between the models as they are shaped right now as if they were not moving. But it seems to me that this is very dangerous because the models could potentially change shape enough during that frame that the resulting collision response looks ridiculous. The reason I ask this question is because in the game I'm planning to work on, I want the characters to engage in close combat. So, if I have two characters in a fist fight or a sword fight, I want to be able to accurately see if the fist hit the enemy or if the sword hit a shield... How might this be done?

If it's just for a game then you realy don't need that accurate collision detection (too expensive). Just try approximate each part of the model/mesh with one or more capped cylinder(s) or sphere(s) and use them for the collision detection.

For instance you could use a capped cylinder between the knee and ankle and a sphere as a foot. If you need more accurate collision detection than that then just use, say a few more spheres as toes (you get the point)

Capped cylinders and sphere are both easy to transform along with the animation as the only consist of one or two points with a radie.

this might interest you as well

That should be capped cylinders. Think of it as a pipe with a sphere at each end.

Sphere - Capped Cylinder Collision
Sphere { point, radie }
CCylinder { pointA, pointB, radie }

1. get the point on the (CCylinder)pointA-PointB line segment that is closest to (Sphere)point.

2. if (Sphere + CCylinder) radie is greater or equal to the distance from that closest point to (Sphere)point then there is a collision.

(step two can be done a little faster if you use distance² (no sqrt()) and the (Sphere + CCylinder) radie² for the test)

Swept tests should be quite simple too.