A lot of the water effects from Windwaker are geometry and/or billboards, so it’s really hard to copy without doing it the same way. For dynamic shore detection, that’s complicated because you would need a flow map if you want waves to go towards the shore. There’s some people that have been using distance fields to create dynamic flowmaps in UE4, but that is an expensive solution. You can also try to use vertex painting to control the direction, but that requires vertex painting by hand. Those distance field solutions also allow for having white caps that wrap around an object, just search the forums for distance field flow maps.
Setting up a color option is pretty easy, all you need is a color paramater and a material instance Instanced Materials | Unreal Engine Documentation