In going thru Buzz’s tutorials on Houdini, I’m up to Keyframe Animation.

After watching the Procedural Modeling, I see how useful it is. I wonder if character modeling would benefit from Procedural Modeling. Would character modeling need to be done through Polygonal Modeling or would Procedural Modeling be of real use there?

Depends on what you're doing.

If you're doing a leading character, then I *personally* would do what's fastest which is not necessarily going to allow you to procedurally edit the model after the fact.

If you're doing a crowd sim, I'd try to make it as flexible as possible so that you can easily populate your crowd with different characters without the chaos of actually modeling them all.