Volume select is where it's at! You can do all sorts of cool things with it. I really wasn't aware of it the longest time.The downside of procedural things in max is that it really gets a bit unwieldy when doing big modifier stacks ... Nice explanation about the pages :)
Doing it non-destructively and procedurally is the way to go. This took me less than 10 mins. You should spend as much time as you need to really finesse the forms. I'm using 3dsMax's modifier stack so this makes the process very simple. Maya's deformers are similar. This result would be your high-poly that you would rip…