Your character has a name, and even a portrait made by you, of your player's 3D model, but after those initial ten minutes of character creation, you basically never interact with the 3D character again. As soon as you begin the tutorial, you're floating in space in a ship. When you switch ships, the game unloads one model and loads the next. When your ship gets exploded, players see an escape pod. Then you get back in another ship.