Quote - I very much like the zoom/pan controls in 3DS Max: panning by dragging the viewport with the middle mouse button pressed, zooming about the mouse cursor using the scroll wheel. Intuitive and fast.
Zoom functions that can be extremely useful: zoom to selection, zoom entire scene, zoom in/out (the latter should be a "mode", in which you can use left mouse+move up/down and the arrow keys to zoom).
The Vue method of dragging around the orthographic views for panning, combined with rotating the camera around the selection center (or scene center when nothing is selected) by dragging is also intuitive and very useful IMO.

And OGRE for scene preview - it would be wonderful. The amount of defail should be configurable by the user - low detail for quickly moving around even in more complex scenes, high detail for OpenGL quality rendering, especially useful for rendering animations.

OGRE supports an extensive array of mapping: normal mapping, parallax mapping, specular mapping, light mapping, you name it. More than Poser, much more than D|S. This mapping functionality is extremely useful for semi-realistic realtime 3D graphics, and will be a great asset to animators.
But most of the current Poser/ DS content doesn't come with all these maps, relying on detailed geometry instead. FAST could benefit from algorithms that derive these maps from the geometry, the same way that it is possible to generate a displacement map from a highly detailed ZBrush model.

I'm pretty excited about OGRE's capabilities thus far, some pretty impressive stuff.  FAST will be able to read and make use of Poser files, but it will also have it's own file format as well, allowing it to make use of some of the features you mentioned that won't be detailed in Poser's file format.

I like the idea of an algorithm that could read in complex geometry and generate detailed displacement maps - that could be a huge boon particularly in animation.  Allow it to read in the geometry, form and apply displacement mapping, and "flatten" the mesh so that the geometry itself would be greatly simplified. 

Again probably not something you'll see in the first release, but certainly something to look at for later on down the road.  The same technique though could also be a great boon to the clothes modeling applet, allowing the clothes modeler to keep the geometries pretty simple but still allowing them to have a tremendous level of detail.

However the clothes modeler would have to be able to do both, since I'd like the output from the clothes modeler to still be compatible with other programs like Poser and DS.   FAST is about giving people more power and options, not about taking them away.

I've also been giving some serious thought to giving the clothes modeler the ability to "fit" clothes to a figure.  Again this is not something that will probably be implemented right away, but in another discussion in a different thread we were talking about how new figures have a very tough time making it in the Poser / DS marketplace because vendors are not likely to create a lot of add on material for them.

As a resutl new figures have a very tough time catching on, even if they offer advantages over what is currently available.  I'm thinking it should be possible, with a bit of creative coding, to allow a conversion of clothing designed for one figure to fit another.  I'm still just in the planning stages here, this would require a lot of testing and much more consideration, but I think it might be possible to build a process of clothes conversion that would rerig as needed and even take advantage of cloth simulation to a certain extent.  It should even be possible to transfer morphs if desired, allowing you to fit pretty much any clothing to any character.

This one is going to take a bit of time to code of course, and probably won't make the first release, but it's certainly something I'd like ot add for future releases when time permits.

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...