I have a character in Maya. It has a skeleton in it. I am working with the skeleton and setting key frames based on bone scale, bone transform, bone rotation.
How will I bring that into Unity?
If I do will that animation just work without requiring extra code?
If I want to alter what the skeleton does at runtime in Unity is that possible?
Is there a section of the Unity docs that is specific to these kinds of tasks?
Thanks // 
You will need to bake the animation down to keys (Edit > Keys > Bake Simulation). Then export to FBX, and away you go!
Read up in the Unity docs on importing assets, first and foremost. Understanding what is expected/possible is the first step to figuring all this out
Once the character is in Unity, there is a drop down to assign the default animation, and whether it starts playing when the game starts. If you only have one animation, you can set it to play by default and it will.
Getting your character walking around on screen, and playing an animation requires a little bit of code. Look at the included character controllers included with Unity.
Yes, if you aren’t playing an animation, the joints are just transforms, like any other object in Unity. You can script any animation on them that you like.
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/HOWTO-ImportObjectMaya.html
No problem. Let me know if you need any more help.
Fantastic! Thank you very much //