Hmm ... actually, with Maya you´re pretty much on the way and you can finish an animation of production quality with Maya alone. However, you could try getting a renderer and with Mental Ray being a freebie to Maya 4.5 users it´ll be quite a lot easier. You could try using yourself a bunch of programs but, not one of them has a magic button that says "great animation", that´ll have to be yours and as such if you use Maya at a certainly more advanced level, yoú won´t pretty much need anything else. (perhaps a composer though) My workflow would be this one: -Create a storyboard, plan out everything first. -Create the models in Maya -Texture (or shade them) -Rig the models -Prepare the scene (Lights and such) -Animate the models -Render (perhaps MRay?) -Compose This workflow itself is guaranteed to keep you busy for months if you intend on doing more than one minute.