You know how games like UT, Quark 3 and their ilk use the video card's engine to do most of the heavylifting, right? I'm looking for an application, or a working environment/engine, that would allow me to use low-to-medium poly models, and make character anim on the fly, for live keying on a local kid's show. The models have yet to be built, so we're not stuck with a particular file format/importing issues, etc. Basically, we need to be able to control the characters in real-time, to interact and react to live-action (the kids). Since this show will be live, and the fast responses from the operator required, the initial thought was to use a game engine. Tilde on TechTV uses a similar approach, but their's is mondo expensive. If we can figure out a way to make this using off-the-shelf PC and mac parts, it'd be sweet.

The closest thing that would be easy for you to use is to obtain the freely available sourcecode and SDKs for most of the major game engines. These are the same tools that game mod makers use to create modifications to these games. You would have to write your our extensions to create the appropriate controls for moving and modifying your characters in realtime, but it could be done pretty easily. ANd the good part is that because it is for broadcast TV, you only have to work with a really low resolution (less than 500x500, so you can do A LOT with no slowdown, even in realtime.