The way you phrased this made me think you wanted to have some kind of automatic mesh detection and so I suggested Unity which is a game engine. But I'm guessing you just want to end up with a movie, so ignore that.make it walk across the landscape without having the feet go through the mesh?
The workflow you would probably use is to bring the Vue landscape into Maya and animate the character walking across the landscape. You would have to animate it by hand ("bone by bone" as you said) and make sure that the position of the foot each time was not penetrating through the mesh (by eye). For your instructor to say movies are not made in maya is a bit misleading because they're not really made in after effects either. I get what he means, but the reality is a complex mixture of 3D renders from Maya, layers and effects in After effects, video footage edited in Premiere etc. I'm just picking examples of applications, there are many others that go into "making a movie".
