Thank you Dave and Jay for your responses.

Here is some background on me fyi:

The main thing about me is that I have limited HD space left in my brain so I tend to focus on a few things and everything else gets lost/deleted/?? (you can thank "Mr.Heineken" for that). I just watched some of a tutorial on shading and I can see how much of an animators life can be "lost" in the hypershade editor. Is it bad manners or bad etiquette to say that TOO many control/adjustment options are a bad thing? Even in the tutorial the instructor can't keep his/her hands off it, doing all kinds of tiny adjustments while instructing - its quite interesting to watch.

Coming from Carrara 8, I appreciated the fact that I could focus on things of the greatest interest to me like camera work, camera placement, (basic) animation, using motion capture files and learning how to light. Another big problem with that other program is that you can't check lighting/animation without rendering which is very annoying even on the minimum quality in the so-called "realistic settings"- Maya has many real time options that are worth the extra expense in the time saved. In fact, I made a 70 minute feature film in Stereo3D that I'm shopping around the festival circuit- A crazy funny story I hope people will enjoy..., eventually.

When I got the the decision to either learn more about Carrara or get into Maya I took a look at one test render I did in Maya and I felll in love!!! Set the doves free!!!!! (calm down, buddy)-- , Maya makes everything look so much better without even really trying in some cases and the rendering is much better/efficient which is why I am here.

I have done about 60 hours of tutorials so far and have a basic understanding of the software. Sometimes I just watch videos to see how things that I don't want to do (Jay, rigging looks like a potential nightmare for me!!!!!) . I just find that because the software is packed with all kinds of functionality its hard to get info on specific workflows.

What I am looking for is to "Narrowcast"- to go from having to learn about every single attribute for every single aspect of the software to learning a pipeline to get a character from poser to maya and nothing else.

I can't seem to find any tutorials where the model is a realistic human character. All of the one I previewed are for cartoon characters which is not my thing.

Anyways, I gotta get back to that chick with the glasses lynda.com for some more on the "Shader Network"--, that should be a tv show..., next week on "Shader Network" a young man learns about the dangers of MIB legacy Mental Ray shaders.