Help Please

I have owned TGE for a year and my expertise is in coding but I am trying to come up with a demo game. The question I have is, I am not quite an artist but I can follow tutorials, what I am trying to do for testing purposes is try to create a character using a tutorial from a book called game character developement with Maya and export it with the DTS exporter. This model is quite extensive and hard to follow. I have another book Learning Maya 7 Foundations that goes over the material in good detail. If I were to try a model using nurbs would it export. They have a really nice robot called Blue that I am going to start with but I don't know if it will export. What are the qualifications of models, nurbs, polygons etc. Both books are good and I will complete each but when reading the first and going over the material I can't even get half the body done because I get stuck, I know there has to be a better way. Each book uses a different style. Both use image planes, but one creates with poly primitives and the other uses the create polygon tool to trace the image and go from there. Any help on this learning curve would be helpful.