So I'm new to XNA, and though I've gotten some stuff working, I've hit a few walls.  I've been looking for tutorials or knowledgebases to help me with my problems, but I have minimal programming experience (which makes me think that XNA probably isn't for me).  I have a bit of a laundry list of things I need to get done, but if anyone would be so kind, I'll start with some simple stuff.

I've gotten the color maps to load on my meshes easily enough, but I also I have bump and alpha maps to go on there.  Any instructions on how to load them and make them work or directions to a tutorial?  My lack of programming knowledge makes it hard for me to understand a lot of the code-heavy tutorials that I find so any explanation would be appreciated.

And next is can I import a camera animation from Maya?  If so, how do I implement it?  And if not, how can I animated a camera within XNA?  I just want to make a flythrough here.

Thanks for any help.

No?  No help?

One way to apply bump map textures (and many other types as normal maps for instance) is going trough shaders (fx file extension). To apply shaders to your Model you need to switch from BasicEffect to Effect and pass some parameters to the shaders, like the texture names and so on.

This site has some tutorials about this (see here). To author fx files (or use and edit an existing one) you may try FX Composer 2 from Nvidia, it's very good, powerfull and easy to use.

Thanks, looks like FX Composer 2 can be a big help.  I've built some of my effects in there so now I'm looking to implement them in XNA.  However, whenever I hit a lot of code in these tutorials, I get pretty lost.  Any tips on the workflow in getting my stuff from FX Composer up and running in XNA?

Okay, it looks like my textures will work now.  Thanks for the advice.  My next big issue is camera animation.  My goal was to animate a flythrough of my environment, but after looking around for a bit, I question just how simple that would be.  Any suggestions for what to do here?