Hi there;
A studio I worked at a while back had a pretty awesome tool we used when creating water meshes; it created what's called an “annulus”, basically a arc-shaped mesh originating from a camera, with the left and right edges of the arc fitting to the FOV of the camera, and the near and far edges of the arc relative to the camera's near/far clipping planes (these were overridable by the user as needed). The most awesome feature of this thing, though, was that it didn't create divisions in the mesh uniformly, but rather exponentially. Basically it was like a really interactive, low-res version of render-time tessellation. It was useful to get fine wave detail close to camera, but less detail further away.
I can't quite figure out how to do something similar in Houdini (and I really wish this was just a native node in it, as part of the Ocean kit). I know I can put down an over-tessellated grid, then polyreduce it back, but heaps of other TDs on these forums have pointed out the inefficiency of working like this. I'm curious if anyone has landed on a more elegant option that simulates this behavior?
