I’m trying to create a raising force field of sorts. I have only really animated in 3DS Max, so after learning that Unity only understands bone animation, I have no clue what to do 
I’ve included some screenshots of the effect I’m trying to accomplish. Any ideas? 
Edit: Animation of what I want: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
The pictures don’t really explain what you are trying to achieve, and your description doesn’t either. If you want the forcefield to actually move, you will most likely want to use Vector3.Lerp in Update(). If you want the forcefield to stay in place but show a scrolling texture, like energy barriers or something like that, you could use a custom shader that changed the UV positions of the texture. Search for “Scrolling Texture Shader” or “UV Offset Shader” in that case. By using Alpha channels, you can just show the lines.