To continue reading and see all the gifs that illustrate what I'm doing, keep reading on
https://80.lv/articles/creating-a-stylized-waterfall-in-unity-part-1/
The first two parts go into the ripple effect
In the third and fourth part I go into the waterfall itself
I wrote a blog on creating a stylized waterfall inspired by Simon Trümpler's work for RiME which got very positive responses. You can read it on my blog, or read it on 80 Level! For this project I used Unity and the Amplify Shader Editor plugin, but this would work in UE4 as well.
Link to the first part on 80.lvl
https://80.lv/articles/creating-a-stylized-waterfall-in-unity-part-1/
I hope it might teach you something!