Creating a gamma mask on live action footage
 

I am just starting a project and I need to have a tennis player figure playing on a virtual tennis court.

The plan is to shoot some live action footage against a blue or green screen, and then create a gamma layer so I can then add the figure's shadows back in using maya.

I am then going create the net, lines and ball in maya and combine it with the live action footage mapped on to a polygon plane.

I have around 3 years of experience with maya, but have never done any chroma keying.

My questions are:
1. I assume I will need to use a separate piece of software e.g. after effects?, to cut out the figure from the green background and create the gamma layer. What is the best way to do this?

2. Although I've never done it before, I am expecting that maya will create some nice shadows from the live action footage if I use a gamma mask. Is that a good idea?

3. The player (i.e. me) has green eyes, so should I use a blue screen instead of green?

If anyone has any other tips I would be most grateful.

Unfortunately I never tried to use the gamma masks in maya, so I don't know if your idea is gonna work.
I guess that you will have to deal with some compositing software like After Effects (obviously, after you have adapted the camera movement for your 3d environment to that of the live action footage and rendered it).
Just to begin to understand this topic (in AE, but the concepts are the same whichever software you'll have to use), I can suggest you to go and watch some videotutorial about green screen by Andrew Kramer and Maltaannon at creativecow, videocopilot and maltaannon sites. There is also some pdf tutorial on computerarts.co.uk about tips and tricks from shooting to compositing in the tutorials section. They're all free and pretty useful.