Well this is totally the wrong forum for this post, but as a self confessed oggler I may be able to offer some help.
I create breasts in a similar way to VanB but instead of manually moving the vertices I use a boolean operation to get it done in just a few mouse clicks, effectively the same sort of CSG that Mike put into DB (haven't played with that yet), that adds the breasts into the chest and culls away overlapping vertices. This is a feature of Max, and i'm sure Maya must have something similar.
EDIT: dont cut in half, keep some of the rearward facing so you can hang them more realistically. Use the vertice stretching tools to reshape the spheres as I find this creates a better effect than vertice editing.
Note that just because women dont have breasts like Lara Croft doesn't meen they should not have!

Computers have clouded our view as to what silicon is for.

God created the world in 7 days, but we're still waiting for the patch.