Quote: " so unfortunately until I figure out how to export animations from 3ds max these will never see the light of the Guru Store"
Max export is pretty straightforward. The main difference with GG is that you ideally want to be skinning the weapon meshes to an animated dummy for it to work best with shaders. The max export settings are the same as you would use for any animated entity. Just make sure your timeline starts at 0 and you are exporting with your full timeline specified and at a 30fps sample rate.
Personally, I find the stock biped rig a headache to animate with but that's just me.
Gigabyte P67A-UD4-B3, Intel Core i7 2600K, 16GB Corsair DDR3, EVGA GTX 970 SC, Win7 Pro 64-bit SP1, Primary monitor @ 1920x1080, secondary monitor @ 1024x1280