I’d be interested in a solution, too. I’ve already tried niagara-based interactable water, but that constantly eats a lot of fps even with the water(s!) in distance. Also the rendering technique of the (non-niagara) water system looks like the quality/performance tradeoff I’m searching for.
I’ll need something like a water sim that player chars carry with them, that gets computation time when that player char is about to interact with water, and that “adds wave deformations” to that water’s surface, fading with distance from the player. For example, a 256x256 texel heightmap style water dynamics sim that simulates the dynamic parts of 5 meter of water around the player, maybe as an overlay to the gerstner waves. And interaction dynamics can be held relatively simple (probably could use simple “player pos/speed” based stimuli instead of a full collision based approach).
The water material already has multiple “entry point” candidates for simulations, some of which even explicitly named like that. But I’m unsure about their respective purpose. If none of such should turn out to be appropriate, maybe a water-sim lookup near the “waves”-part of the water material could do much of the trick.
Isn’t this a topic (rough style) worked on so very frequently that it’s getting difficult to assume it is still up to gameengine users to implement?