However last year I did work on a project involving 3D terrain rendering, and I used Ogre for a lot of prototyping and testing. For this project I developed a terrain rendering algorithm I call SCSLOD (Symmetric Cluster Set LOD), which I'll be presenting at Siggraph this december:
http://www.siggraph.org/asia2011/techni ... n=sketches
("Fast Multiresolution Terrain Rendering with Symmetric Cluster Sets")
Basically it's an improvement of the standard "Chunked LOD" technique which I found useful. It reduces the batch count 6x on average.
Also... in my dabbling in making my own simple engines from scratch I've come to appreciate how much of a time saver and huge asset Ogre is to actually getting a working product done. I think I might be working on a big-ish project with Ogre soon (for a senior design project for my university), which might involve planets and forests and dynamic lighting and... you get the picture
. If I do this, I will almost certainly open source it 
