In this paper, we present a novel approach to model 3D human body with variations on both human shape and pose, by exploring a tensor decomposition technique. 3D human body modeling is important for 3D reconstruction and animation of realistic human body, which can be widely used in Tele-presence and video game applications. It is challenging due to a wide range of shape variations over different people and poses. The existing SCAPE model is popular in computer vision for modeling 3D human body. However, it considers shape and pose deformations separately, which is not accurate since pose deformation is person-dependent. Our tensor-based model addresses this issue by jointly modeling shape and pose deformations. Experimental results demonstrate that our tensor-based model outperforms the SCAPE model quite significantly. We also apply our model to capture human body using Microsoft Kinect sensors with excellent results.