I always wanted to try distance to nearest because the automatic generation means I can have perfectly accurate shorelines that would also correspond dynamically with any changes in the water. The only problem I can foresee is I can’t continue crashing waves onto the landscape because there is no way for the landscape to detect the mesh’s distance to a certain point unless I use some form of an extended sobel filter from the height. I’ll give it a shot in 4.12 and let you know. Hopefully, HOPEFULLY Landscape is integrated with distance field rendering! Otherwise, there would be no point. It would be awesome if UE4 had a really good scalable fluid surface actor, one that can use different methods for crashing shorelines. I wish I was able to have the shore retract, then dry up before new waves hit. We already have some awesome car paint, metal rendering, just about every other surface imaginable working in UE4 except water and hair. These two things are incredibly difficult to get right, you just always have to settle for “appropriate.”
The texture technique is the only technique that would work properly on mobile that’s even worth mentioning.