i don't know if this is supposed to be on the newbie forum but im still a newb bwing only 10 weeks into maya so im posting it here anywayz

i am in a 3d class we have to create something in maya for the teacher every 2 weeks and after a while of making something simple just for a grade and throwing all that work away i decided i would start making things and turning em in and then using them in a larger grander scheme. I decided to have a long bad guy tear apart a fortress and kill all the good guys and have a final good guy sorta like a boss fight and make it really epic. So i drew out some ideas got it all on paper... I just need help getting it into maya. I will upload pictures later when i find a scanner although i admit they aren't much.

I will just list the problems i have run into so far...
-Does Maya have a built in physics generator?
-How am i gunna make blood spurt out of guys bein cut down?
-How do i cange the shape and color of things in key frames (if i edit a poly after a keyframe it just changes the shape for the whole thing)
-I have shoulderpads for the bad guy that are going to be skulls but the lower jaw needs to hang down over the shoulder and be on a hinge (the bad guy swings his arm the jaw might bounce up a bit)
-Is there a way to do chain mail as a cloth (as long as it looks like chain mail i dont care how its done)
-I need to learn to rig a skeleton lol i fail at that
-should i rig the head seperate from the body or same? i plan for the characters to talk alot
-Is it worth the effort to make actual blades of grass and us that or just texture something over a flat surface or neither?
-The armor of the final good guy and the bad guy glows, and the bad guy's armor is gunna need to have smoke coming out of it, blue smoke. How would i do glow effects on armor?
-What is the best way to texture skin?


thats all i can think of at the moment but any help with any of it would be awesome i have until like the end of march to figure everythign out so no rush i guess.