Model format

FBX & collada can be exported from maya, you'll still need to do a bit of work to get the model to animate though. the FBX SDK (available from the alias website) includes some example code that demos how to render the fbx data. Alternatively, my site (robthebloke.org) has a fair amount of info about how to export the data from maya and render the animated models (with sample code). Cal3d is another possiblilty, though i'm not a fan.

The collda is a new standard from sony and now support by some movie company and the Epic games.The new vision of Unreal Engine 3 will use the collda standard as their data format.
The best reason to use collda is because its a xml tec based standard.But its really complax and if you have not a strong xml parser you can not do it well.
But the xml parser with schame support is different by platform. This may cause a new problem for you!
May be you can create a simple xml data format in your game engine and waiting for the result of the data format war like the disc war of BD and HD.
If you use a open standard data format, that mean you game model may used by other people or company with no authorization

Thanks a bunch. I'm going with Cal3D for now since it seems more practical and common. I had issues with FBX unfortunately.