I'm about to start working on my final year project. I want to be able to get into it as fast as possible without having to implement all the stuff I need before I can start on what the project's actually about. My project is to do with generating animations. Specifically it's about making "reaching" animations. So for example making a character pick up a gun in a realistic way. The key point to this is that it will be aware of other things in the environment. If the gun is under a table the ultimate aim would be to make the character crouch down and reach under it. I would like to demo this with a simple game so engines focussed around game development are probably best suited to it. It's fairly important that it's open source as it's quite likely I'll have to delve into the animation system. I've used Ogre before so that's a good choice for rendering. But ideally I'd also like to use something to get a game like environment up and running as quick as possible. So that would include basic physics so I can make a character walk around a room with simple collision detection. Does anyone have any suggestions or comments? I've never really done a project like this before and it's quite a large project.

Another thing that's quite important is that it needs to work on both Windows and Linux. It seems most open source engines do so I don't suppose that will be a problem.

Yeah blender was something I was considering. How big is a Blender install? The problem is I'll be doing this on university machines so it can be awkward finding space to install these things and getting all the right permissions. They have Maya so they don't have Blender installed. What's compatibility like between Blender and Maya? I might borrow some models from other people which will have been made with Maya.