Josh Clos has written a nice tutorial on creating waves in 3ds max using the ideas used in Imageworks' animated movie Surf's UP (http://www.joshclos.com/2013/09/28/3ds-max-tutorial-rigging-waves/).
I tried to duplicate these ideas to be able to implement in Maya and possibly extend it a little further.
(For this tutorial i used a convexity map creating plug-in called r7_vertCurvature. You can get it here:http://www.trisoup.net/shtuff/scripts/r7_vertCurvature.zip )
