Quote - 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.

Ya - I think there is definately a future for this program.  I haven't quite decided how to handle the full spectrum of collision detection yet, primitives  of course for rough animations, but I'd hopefully like to come up with something that is relatively fast and yet gives good enough results.  Always the tradeoff there, the more accurate it is the longer it takes to calculate.

The other thing I thought of today was a distributed computing network of some sort, not at first of course but eventually this might be something to consider.  When it comes to rendering parsing out a render and having to transfer all the necesarry files to a cluster of machines makes it a pretty time/network intensive task and as a result the benefits aren't so pronounced.

But what about a series of servers for doing things like cloth dynamics / collision detection and other math intensive functions?  Since your not having to toss huge image files back and forth, this might prove to be a real boon.

Imagine the SETI project on Linux - only this one dedicated to math calculations for 3d renders under FAST.  Instead of having your PC doing all the heavy lifting as far as calculations are concerned, it connects to a peer to peer network designated for this pupose, tosses calculation packets out to any available servers, coallates the response and applies it to your scene.

Again were probably not looking at something in the first release here, but certainly something I think that could prove to be of huge benefit when it comes to animating and dynamics, being able to use a moderately priced computer to do very complex animation work thanks to a distributed computing model.

Right now I'm hip deep in notes on the rigging system, I need something that will accomodate Posers "Morph the crap out of everything" technology and still be able to handle more advanced rigging with weights and gravity effects. 

One thing I have considered is a rigging "packager" of sorts, allowing you to rerig a figure and release just the rigging info, it would be useless of course to anyone that didn't already own the original figure but it would allow you to apply new rigging to a pre-purchased figure quickly and easily.  Since FAST's internal file system will have a built in database it won't really matter where a file is stored on the actual drive, if the object file referenced exists anywhere in FAST's library it can find it - lol - well fast for lack of a better term.

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