I'm still fairly new to importing animations into my OpenSceneGraph OpenGL code, but I have a Maya animated character that has a walk, run and get shot animation. I'm looking for resources and ideas as to how I can switch from animation to animation and how to load it all. I've looked into Maya MotionBuilder which saves mulitple takes to a file, but only the more expensive Pro version has that capability. Does it make sense to have multiple animations in the same file, same timeline, and point to different spots in that file - or is the multiple take, non-linear file make more sense? Thanks!

yes it does make sense...
I don't know about the maya format but I use the .x format and all my animations are in the same file
if you create your wrapper class right for the model, you can just have a begin/end frame for each animation and switch'em up depending on the state of the model

for example, I've set up my XNode class like this
AnimDesc animdesc;
animdesc.begin = 10;
animdesc.end = 100;
animdesc.speed = 10;

XNode* x = new XNode("myx.x");
x->setAnimation(animdesc);

and I have all the possible animations stored in a AnimDesc Map, which are loaded from a file containing the begin/end/speed/name of animation

the hardest part is to make your class that'll load your model and set it up for this kind of thing to work
I recently began using the irrlicht engine, which does it all