I only just recently picked up SubD and Vertex tools and I think they’re probably the right tool for this job, but I haven’t learned them yet.
This is what I remember from school as a Boundary Value Problem: two regions of space where both the value and the derivative of the functions must equal each other at the boundary for the sake of smooth continuity. Here I have one region with waves and the other with flat water. I think Vertex Tools could scale the wave at the boundary to zero amplitude to match the flat water, and it’s selection tool could taper that effect off into the rest of the waves, perhaps? Am I heading in the right direction?
That’s the general idea, though we’d like to scale the peaks down to average, and the troughs up to average. That’s with Fredo Scale, obviously. The waves got turned into a mesh first it would seem.
The sea wall gets inundated. To go really wild, you could go nuts modeling breaking waves, but I can’t even contemplate that modeling task yet. FEMA also has a diagram and formula to calculate crest and trough base on the depth of water, but even that’s more than I want to do. The main thing is locating the boundary line location from the FEMA map, whether that’s realistic or not, and how you turn that into a 3D diagram that’s more diagrammatic than real.
Another thought would be that as the crest and troughs become shallower, the peak to peak distance becomes shorter also. So maybe scaling successive sine waves might work? Prior to using the Extrude tools…
Vertex Tools with a Soft Select Radius basically did what I thought. I had to do it to the top surface only and then patch the volume back together as the bottom was being influenced by the soft select radius.
The big surprise: With Vertex Tools, I can’t for the life of me select vertices with a Wacom tablet. It just refuses to work no matter how carefully I try.
