Question about Control Water And Sculpt Spell interaction

Question

I tried to Answer this question: Can “x'/level” area effects be set at smaller sizes?

I was trying to find a spell with an area that can become bigger if your caster level is bigger: Control Water was the one I heard about (is there more spell like this, perhaps one could make it easier?)

I'm now clueless about the interaction with the Sculpt Spell metamagic feat:

(Complete Arcane p.83)

Benefit

You can modify an area spell by changing the area's shape to either a cylinder (10-foot radius, 30 feet high), a 40-foot cone, four 10-foot cubes, a ball (20-foot-radius spread), or a 120-foot line. The sculpted spell works normally in all respects except for its shape. For example, a lightning bolt whose area is changed to a ball deals the same amount of damage, but affects a 20-foot-radius spread.

A sculpted spell uses a spell slot one level higher than the spell's actual level.

• The area of the spell (wich you can control) goes bigger with your caster levels, but I guess if you modify it via Sculpt Spell it will now have a fixed area that won't become bigger with your caster levels, is this correct by RAW or is there a rule I haven't found somewhere about this?
• You can create a whirlpool on the ocean or even cast it on water elementals so the newly shaped area could help in these 2 situations, it might be useless in the other situations (raise/lower unless there are other water around wich could make the 4 10-foot cubes really useful if you need to raise the water for 4 different small ponds within the long range of the spell)
• Of course some modifications of targets are useless in certain situations, a 120-foot line of water could probably not be a valid target area in this case, but the four 10-foot cubes to create multiple whirlpools on the ocean is quite clever if you need to affect more/less areas.

Answer 1

As written, Sculpt Spell has specific boundaries that constrain the spell area.

As a DM I'd rule no simply on wording, but there's also a similar issue with Sculpt Spell I found here, whereby a sculpted spell is still capped by the spell's range (their example is using a sculpted Burning Hands to make a 40 ft cone. The range if burning hands is 15 ft, and so the spell effect terminates past that range within the cone). In this case, the area of the spell becomes strictly constrained by the range of the spell and the limits of Sculpt Spell.

A quick check of the Rules Compendium reveals nothing on the matter, and Complete Mage/Arcane don't offer anything (as far as I can tell) in regards to new metamagic rules.