what dou you recommend?
What material properties should I add / modify to achieve that result?
Should my efforts be focused on the material or illumination of the world?
You need to set the specular to 1 and the roughness to 0 (or values that appeal to you)
also you will need to have a Sphere/Box Reflection Capture actor covering your water or you activate planar reflections in the Project settings and in the material, but that costs alot of calculation.
the essencial steps for a water material are:
Select the Material node with the Inputs to see the settings in the details tab
Set the Blend mode (material panel) to translucent
Set the Lighting mode (translucency panel) to surface TranslucencyVolume or Surface Forwardshading - this is needed to activate specular
On the specular and opacity channel you can use a Fresenel node
If you like you can put a single value of 1.3333… into the refraction input (it’s the IOR for water)
Some people also set metallic to 1 wich is not physical correct, but do whatever suits the look
For the Opacity it would actually need the distance from the surface to the object behind it. This is more complex to get, but you should be fine with a fresnel node.
edit: if you want to use the refraction and get strange looking streching artifacts in the water, try to set the refraction from Index Of Refraction to Pixel Normal Offset, it’s less accurate but also less ugly ^^.
You can try to make it unlit, and add fake reflections using cubemap texture, and control its brightness with some additional multiplier. This is cheaper than lit translucency with lightning volume.
Additionaly you can vary deep/shallow water color by interpolating 2 colors with depthfade or normalized differrnce between scenedepth and pixeldepth.
