well clouds are looking kind of 2d when far away from the player, people won't realize very much a lack of realism, even when a simple plane is used.
Water at the other hand is something very complex IMHO, because it's behaviour depends a lot on the scale of things. A tsunami wave looks completely diffrent comparent to some small waves in a pot. Also, in the macro scale of drops the surface tension of water plays an important role, while the inertia of the mass defines the appearence in big scales.
Byside the physics of water, the way it affects light is also very complex. So when you're under water, other things under water look ok, but the world that is over the water level will look distorted. It's the same vica versa, when you watch some water from outside, the seaground is distorted. So Water with all it's individual depths due to waves and various ground levels is some kind of a megacomplex lense in eternal motion. you can calculate the distortion of each pixel, but it's a pretty intensive task that needs to consider the wave height, the ground level and the angle of view.
Additionally this mega-lense will of course also produce dynamic caustics, that's just a further factor that makes it hard to simulate it realiticly.
Using some fake fx will do the job imho. I wouldn't spend more than 5ms per frame for the water parts.
Water at the other hand is something very complex IMHO, because it's behaviour depends a lot on the scale of things. A tsunami wave looks completely diffrent comparent to some small waves in a pot. Also, in the macro scale of drops the surface tension of water plays an important role, while the inertia of the mass defines the appearence in big scales.
Byside the physics of water, the way it affects light is also very complex. So when you're under water, other things under water look ok, but the world that is over the water level will look distorted. It's the same vica versa, when you watch some water from outside, the seaground is distorted. So Water with all it's individual depths due to waves and various ground levels is some kind of a megacomplex lense in eternal motion. you can calculate the distortion of each pixel, but it's a pretty intensive task that needs to consider the wave height, the ground level and the angle of view.
Additionally this mega-lense will of course also produce dynamic caustics, that's just a further factor that makes it hard to simulate it realiticly.
Using some fake fx will do the job imho. I wouldn't spend more than 5ms per frame for the water parts.