Quote - Does dynamic now mean canned?  I'd say simmed or pre-calculated, if you are referring to things too demanding to give realtime feedback for.  I think Poser, and many others, abuse the term.  I guess dynamic literally means it changes and is not static (or conforming in our lexicon) but I tend to think of dynamic things as being immediate and/or responsive.

Time for bed I think.

Lol - well, in this case the use of the term is accurate for both genre, both Poser's non-realtime features and the gaming industries real time updates, the word dynamic of course simply meaning "change".

Poser, and most other 3d apps like it, are designed to output higher quality images or video, where all the calculations for dynamics are pre-calculated and applied, then a render is done, and the final results are then viewed.  Please note the term "higher quality", particularly when applied to lower end apps like Poser, should be taken as a broad term - the technology in both areas has changed significantly several times since apps like Poser started there development cycle.

In a gaming situation, however, you're generally using meshes of lower detail to keep response speeds up and applying calculations real time in order to get an in-game effect.  Both are "dynamic" in the fact that the meshes are being changed by calculations, it's merely a question of when those calculations occur.

So in truth both are dynamic, however in the case of most 3d modeling and rendering apps the calculations are applied prior to the end result, because the end result is generally either a still image file or a movie file.  The final result is "static" either way, every time you play it or view it you will get the same result, so there is no need to sacrafice any image realism for speed.

In the case of 3d games, the dynamics have to be applied in game, because the situations are very mutable, the calculations need to be applied realtime.  In order to maintain a decent frame rate, this generally means much more attention needs to be paid to the modeling and setup because those realtime calculations do come with some additional overhead of there own.

The higher poly your meshes are, the slower your calculations - so for the most part games use much lower poly meshes to accomodate for the overhead needed for their dynamics engines.  However it should be noted that even lower poly meshes, when properly presented and used in conjunction with good texture/displacmenet maps, can still produce some pretty high quality results.

I'd like for FAST to be able to take advantage of the best of both worlds, to be able to do high poly photorealistic output as well as output optimized for gaming, or for animation for that matter. 

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