I thought since there's been a couple of posts
about splines that I should show MAX 7.5 capabilities.
You can do pretty much everything with it from animation paths
to, as you see, being a substitute for Boolean objects.
Boolean (CSG) objects are not MAX strongest feature and
they can be a pain in the .. to get to look good.

In the first image, the Swept spline on the right
has union intersections. Normally you won't see
the result of this but if you use, for instance, a glass material it
comes in handy. The sweep modifier is a addon that comes
with the 3D Studio VIZ extensions. I haven't seen
it yet, but I assume that it's included in MAX 8.
The Sweep modifier is a loft modifier with a couple
of built in shapes but you can pick your own profiles.
Most of the time the lofter is a bit overkill so they
came up with this which is much easier to handle.

All of these are modifiers on the object stack.
This means that that you can go back and
change the spline and the final object will reflect
the change.

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