Greetings, My name is Robert I am brand new to ZBrush, introduced to it by a friend, and have some things that are floating around in my head. I have very little 3d modeling experience but have had years of experience with Adobe Photoshop. I am pretty fast learner so I don’t believe that will hurt my ideas of what I would like to do. Ok now to the purpose of this post…
My idea - I have gotten sick and tired of great books being DESTROYED by horrible movie productions. The final straw being the Eragon movie. And have decided I would become self learned in the whole animated movie genre by recreating great stories, Inheritance Cycle first, as a hobby and free of charge for those who enjoy movies and books. As far as I understand this doesn’t break any laws due to the fact it will not be commercially used and is basically going to be youtube style releases. If you have any information on if it is against the law please let me know! 
Now to continue…
I have looked over tons of zbrush art and decided, very easily, that for my character development zbrush is a must. I have read that XSI was used in LotR but is a very complicated program to learn and that Maya is simpler and just as good. So I was looking around more on environments and how they are made in large scale for 3d production. Before I could read on much of anything I ran acrossed Vue 6.5 and I must say http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/vue/vue_6_infinite/v6i_video_layout.php makes wanting to use this for the environment enticing. Only problem I truely see is that rigging and character animation isn’t good in this program. So this brings me to the title of this thread. Is using; Zbrush for character, minor environmental modeling, and texturing. - Maya for character rigging and animation. - Vue 6.5 for heavy continent sized environment creation and overall rendering. A plausible pipeline for the creation?
P.S. - Sorry for my noobish post. If all goes well I will consistantly post production progress for characters and other.