This is going to be a whopper, some of these questions really do back up the fact that you are new so I'm going to say this, you may have bitten off more than you can chew as the questions encompass texture painting, rigging, animation, dynamic simulations and FX, and the use of other programs (painting up those textures, basically being your own sound department, post process etc). You actually haven't run into "problems" on this yet, you have been wondering how to approach achieving certain effects, problems are WHEN you're actually trying to get it done and you're getting effed up results, or Maya's crashing, the renderer is crashing, this error, that error, this was working fine a minute ago wtf, this file got corrupted, why is this acting so slow!? Why is this not displaying correctly!? Dodgy info in the help files for something that seems simple, Operating System woes and the list goes on. I'm going to try to answer the questions just so you see what Mayaniac and I mean. -Does Maya have a built in physics generator? Yes it does, check out rigid bodies, soft bodies. -How am i gunna make blood spurt out of guys bein cut down? Maybe the nParticles in Maya2009 will help you out there, or if you have access to Realflow. -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) Changing color over time, a really simply of doing it is right clicking the attribute and seleing set keyframe, the timing will act different depending on type of keyframe, stepped, spline etc(check out the graph editor). Changing shapes over time, check out blendshapes. -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) I'm not sure I get that question, but the first thing I thought of was Set Driven Keys, check it out. The thing is, articulate character animation takes work. -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 can't see why not, as long as you set the properties of the cloth so that the behaviour is believable, good texture work should take care of the "look". -I need to learn to rig a skeleton lol i fail at that Rig something really really simple then animate it, if it handles badly then it needs work. -should i rig the head seperate from the body or same? i plan for the characters to talk alot /shrug -Is it worth the effort to make actual blades of grass and us that or just texture something over a flat surface or neither? You can use Fur, you can use alpha planes, Paint FX, unless the camera is going to get really really really close to the grass or maybe some blades need to go flying then I don't see much point in actually modeling grass. -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? Do you mean like a soft bloom effect? (like that effect in some glamour portraits) that can be done in post. Or like zhroom zhroom light saber affecting the lighting of surrounding objects type of effect? In that case you will have to tweak the shader to appear to be a bright surface, and you'll probably have to do some parenting and light linking if you're not going to use FG. -What is the best way to texture skin? I'm afraid thats a very broad question, check out some texture painting tutorials to get the gist of it.