Hey Everyone,

What I really want to do in Maya is the following (and this is an overall, probably will take months to do right goal):

- Take a camcorder and record on a tripod some scenes from my rooftop deck and local park. 5-10 second scenes.

- Incorporate that into Maya so I can at first, just have a Sphere realistically roll across the screen.

- Incorporate a spinning spaceship across the screen.

- Incorporate a spinning spaceship across the screen, but give it some depth of field (behind a tree or something like that).

- Have a giant dog/dinosaur/snake/whatever move realistically across the screen with depth of field.

- Have a giant dog/dinosaur/snake in a scene but also have it interact with my 5 year old daugther ("it chasing her or something").

- Crack open a beer after I've accomplished that.

I've started to play with Maya live and I'm not doing horribly at it. I'm stuck a little bit on constraints. I think my tracking/solving is ok.

I guess I'm looking for some pointers and suggestions on how I can best do this. The document I'm working off of isn't bad. I would love it if there were some kind of video tutor for this (even something I would be willing to purchase).

So, thoughts guys?