"Greg, I'm going to start calling you Max!" Thanks, John (I'll call you Opera). ;-) "May I ask...in Max do you "create a walk cycle" by manipulating the settings of a purposed sub-feature which interacts with the bones, or when you say 'I am creating a walk cycle for it' do you mean you are learning to hand key-frame the character in it's own style?" Well, there's a lot of things you can do here. There are indeed purposed sub-features which interact with the bones. In Max, we call them "Controllers", "Constraints", and "Wires". You can, for example, wire a noise frequency to a set of bones (like arms, legs, hip, whatever), that will make the bone "shake" automatically, giving you jerkiness to the movement. That's actually what I did here. You can control the level of noise, and it's frequency in various ways. Since I'm using Biped as the rig, there are some limitations to it over Max standard bones, but for the most part, it's highly customizable. I can set up a wire, for instance, that bends the fingers to a certain degree whenever I rotate the head. The possibilities are great. For this walk cycle, I started out with Biped footsteps, which are basically the equivalent of using the Walk Designer in Poser. It gives you a basic, generic walk cycle on your rig. From there, I added a new animation layer over that walk cycle, and just keyframed a few new movements over it. Using layers basically allows you to "blend" keyframed motion over previous motion (be it keyframed or mocap), without screwing up the previous keyframes or motion curves on the layer beneath. It's a useful feature that comes in handy when doing custom stuff like this, because it allows you to quickly add motion "detail" on a fresh clean timeline. I just kept adding new layers, and adding some subtle stuff till I came up with this. I have improved on it somewhat since I posted this, so I'll have to get that rendered out sometime soon. :-)

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.