Is there a soft selection?
 

In Polygon Mode I'd like to select a vert to manipulate and want the surrounding verts to gradually be affected so I can easily create ground geometry. Is there a way to do this in Maya?

The only soft selection I know of is available with the Byrons poly tool plugin. Can be purchased from his site, oh and it has loads of other cool functions too.

You're other option is to create a nurbs plane and use the sculpt suraces tool.

Modify > Transformation Tools > Proportional Modification Tool. Not quite as featured as Soft selection.

or create a cluster and feather the weights...
Joe

You can also sculpt on polys themselfs.

thanks for all the help!

The xySoftPeak mel script at the bottom of this page works pretty well.

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/plugin...modeling&sort=