Yeah, I've always been amazed how helpful and supportive the adult community is.
I believe 3dmax is a general purpose 3D program, and animating things should be one of its core features.
I learned 3D through Blender, a free 3D modeling and animating program. animating at its simplest is changing an objects properties across a time line. place a cube at point A, set the time line at time 0:00, save location a, move to time X:XX, change cube location, and save the new location.
When it comes to making animations, specifically animating models you make yourself, I assume you mean character models.
The first thing I want to point out is, Topology. How clean is your model's mesh? Depending on how you are modeling, you may not need to worry about this, but if you are sculpting characters, one thing you need to learn about before you animate is 're-topology' its a skill and some people hate it, but understanding topology goes hand and hand with understanding animation. Its not really a skill you can master before animating, as you better understand how to animate, you can work on better character topology, and better topology will lead to better animations.
After that, its about learning character rig, IE give your character a skeleton, learn how to map the body to the skeleton (learn a bit about weight painting), and then you are ready to experiment with animations. To animate, rather than moving a cube around, you'll be posing the 'character rig' or the little skeleton you make for the character.
learning animation and all the nuances is a very large skillset to summarize in a simple post like this, but just like with learning any new skills there will be tons of questions and tons to learn.
So with there being so much to do, what's something to keep in mind and plan for in the future? For me, I like to automate parts of my animation. I'm sure 3D max can do something like this, but I'll use terms from Blender since that's what I'm familiar with. In blender, there are these things called 'drivers.' simply put, you can control anything with anything. I can control the rotation of a joint based on if another character is in a scene or not, or used data from a physics simulation to control 'shape keys' sculpted to make stylized or organic bouncy breasts. When I say I like to automate parts of animations, I'm referring too all the small things you learn as you about human locomotion. For example, I'll use one bone to represent a character shifting their weight to one leg or the other, and this 'control' bone will then either directly control the character rig, or I'll simply save the pose and 'add' the pose on top of my current time line, this way I don't have numbers fighting each other while I'm editing (and it lets me go back in afterwards and adjust it more so a character puts more sway in their hips).
I do this for all sorts of effect, this way I don't have to hand animate everything. so one bone could controls a pre made animation for squatting, another for various physical effect (you may have a better time learning about primary and secondary animation effects from studying 2D animation tutorial videos rather than any 3D video), such as boob and but bounce effects, and then instead of hand animating them you just need to work on blending things together, focusing just on the style and the art of the animation. An example of focusing on style can be simple, effects such as when walking, having the arms swing forward a moment before a step begin is just a small change in timing, but it can be used to indicates a character is in a rush, or if their arms lag behind the feet for a moment, that then indicates that the character is relaxed and has swagger.
