Great improvement has been achieved in the protection of national dance through multimedia technology. An interactive design approach for national dance based on realistic 3D character is proposed in this paper. This approach comes with three sub steps: Firstly, the realistic face was reconstructed based on a front photo, in this step, the facial feature points of photo are selected interactively; and then, the realistic face was built through texture mapping and fusion based on the standardized face model database. Secondly, the construction of realistic body is realized through introducing the stretching model and the vector differential adjuster. Finally, the interactive display of national dance is realized by virtual reality engine. The experimental results show that this approach is user-friendly, and can generate a high-quality realistic 3D character in real time while protects the worthy cultural heritage effectively at the same time