Yeah the SSR + translucency doesn’t work, it’s one on a list of many issues. To be honest, if you don’t need translucency I would stick to the opaque surface, it is a much simpler and more performant way of creating water. So long as your scenes don’t require it, I would avoid it altogether, there are so many little issues to deal with using the deferred renderer as it stands. If Epic adds in a forward rendering solution for translucency and implements the planar reflections for surfaces, then for sure give it a try, but it has been nothing but trouble for me so far.
Looks pretty good so far! It might be moving a little to fast, but the motion is there.
If you haven’t already, the one thing that has helped me the most is to use a ton of scalar/vector parameters for almost everything, then playing with the sliders and values in a material instance. Having to compile shaders every time you want to make any changes can take forever, so even though it is a lot of work to set up, being able to fine tune values in an instance will be a huge help for you as you adjust the look, and it will update live in the viewport. You can always change them back to being constants later once you are happy with the results.