I used CryEngine 3 many years ago, I do remember it having very easy to use water tools. Unreal’s are currently more finicky, and its something that I really hope they work on. It has some very nice features and its very adjustable and customisable in classic UE fashion, but usability leaves a bit to be desired atm.
I always work with imported landscapes from World Machine - a tip I’ve found that is very useful is to construct the height map with the intention that the water line is at 0 in Z, and exactly half your height map lays above and below the water line. Unreal water bodies get upset if theyre too far away from the origin and sometimes just refuse to render.
Also as (kinda) previously mentioned, UE water can affect the landscape through edit layers. I don’t use this feature because enabling edit layers on a 256 sq km landscape bricks my video card, but if you are using it, be sure to set the right blend mode in the details panel. To be honest I’m not absolutely sure what the correct mode is to leave a landscape untouched, but I recall having success with “Max” and “Additive”. Theres only 4, so try each until you get the right behaviour.
I am working a lot with the Ocean actor right now, and I can promise it does work if you get it set up right. It’s just much more finicky and very easy to have it just go missing entirely until you get used to its setup quirks.
With that said, because of the way its built, its possible to do your own home-brew modifications to the shader which is nice. I currently have a modified version of the material that has rolling shoreline waves and a couple of other little things built on top of the original.
Final edit: I messed around with the main branch from Git the other week. Usability of the entire thing was a mess, as might be expected from that branch, so I switched back to the Early Access for now. However I did notice that they appear to have made changes to the Ocean actor to the effect that it is now automatically an infinite plane. In Early Access however, you will need to select the WaterMeshActor that is added to the scene automatically when you add a water body, find its “Extent in Tiles” and/or “Tile Size” in the details panel, and set X and Y tile numbers to some value that is large enough to give you the illusion of infinity. It defaults to 64 which isn’t very large. I switched it to 512 in each direction for now.