I know some people have talked a little about using Maya to make animations (I am very new to animation...like I started yesterday). I have used Milkshake but it somehow ran out and requires registration, so I wanted to import into Maya but I dont know how. I've used SimPE to export things, but I'm not sure what type to export and what Maya can read.

Yes it is possible. Providing you do not use the free version of maya, I managed to import the skeleton, textures and skins of body, face and hair. You can play with it to make animations. But maya animations include IK and in/out tangents (like the sims2 animation files seem to) and there is no exporter existing right now. Althought it looks like the right tool to do it.

Export to .obj for the skins, tga for the textures and smd for the bones. You need to download a smd converter for the bones thought. If you want I can provide you with my maya file containing all of them (with some textures glitch).
--
Francois