I am having the exact same issue. I’m a newbie to Unreal and haven’t tried rendering out a scene with water until 5.4, so I thought I may have messed up some of the settings, but even after trying various settings on the body surface, I am getting a blank space in my render.
Ive been trying to render a movie (no water other than tears) using ffmeg+settings to kick out an mp4. I got it to work once when switching between render (legacy) and movie render queue. Just once = queue the tears.