Something else about OGRE that wiould be wonderful for animators: positional 3D audio. Open source, well integrated, and under the same license as OGRE itself. Works very well in realtime rendering, but it should also be possible to make use of it when doing non-realtime animation renders. Anyway, it would beat the pants off the limited audio capabilities of Poser.
Scriptable AI (also available for an OGRE environemnt, open source and free) could also help in setting up long and complicated animations.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I see a great future for FAST as a tool that can set up an animation as if it were a 3D game or virtual environment, but that also can render video and audio non-realtime at high quality. I don't know of any other application that can do exactly this.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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