Ocean Shader

I have never used water before in maya so to start with I decide to try out the ocean shader.

I created a very basic river bed scene and added a plane in the middle to act as the water. I know that the ocean shader works very well when it is used for oceans but I wanted to see if I could create a river using it.

I searched around to see if you could use the ocean shader and have it react to objects moving through the water but this soon came up blank. I then started to think that at some point the river would be in the picture before the animals would cross it so this could be a good use for the ocean shader.

I didn't use any tutorial but started to play around with the settings and rendering a single scene to see if th waves were how I wanted them. The main strings I played with were:
Scale
Wave speed
Num. Frequencies
Wave Dir. Speed
Wave Length Min
Wave Height
Wave Peaking

Changing these settings seemed to help me achieve the effect I wanted but it still looked too much like a ocean cropped down to fit between the two banks.

This was the test I managed to achieve firstly:



The first video, I am not happy with as the waves are too close together to be a river. It does not look natural. The waves are also very slow. So slow that you can hardly see the movement which is not natural given the closeness of the waves. I have adjusted the waves and made them larger and also sped up the waves.

This is the second attempt:



I think this ones is too fast so have only adjusted the speed of the waves to see if it makes it look more natural.

This is my third attempt:



I think that it looks ok but I still do not think this is the method to use. It will not interact with objects in the water and even if I only use the ocean shader for scenes where the animals are not in the water, it may be hard to match the colour and effect whilst using a different method when they are in the water.

 I have been researching fluids and wakes and will try a few tests using these. I am also looking at a book called Mastering Autodesk Maya with some good tutorials about fluids. Particles are also something I am going to look into and it may be that I would have to use a mix of methods. I think whichever gives the best effect then that would be the one to use but I obviously have a long way to go before I know which method I prefer.