The need to simulate the behaviour of biological tissues in virtual environments originated intense research to devise techniques for physically-based modeling of objects whose shape and topology can dynamically evolve. The relevant amount of computation required by the existing techniques and the growing complexity of the scenes to be simulated impose the study of more flexible methods that should be adaptable to both the accuracy required by the simulation and the complexity of the scene. We propose to enhance the flexibility of deformable object models by introducing a multiresolution approach. The reason for proposing the adoption of a multiresolution approach in deformable object modeling is to allow easy adaptation of the granularity of the representation of each object, depending from the forecasted simulation time complexity and the interactive frame rate required. Multiresolution can also be used to adjust data granularity, according to the accuracy needed to preserve the properties of the material and to obtain a sufficiently correct dynamic behaviour of the object. A first design of a multiresolution deformable model is presented in the paper, based on hexahedral cells and a hierarchical decomposition scheme.