The project was made by Ghislain Girardot using UE and the Niagara system to set up water particles and foam.

3D Artist and tutorial-maker Ghislain Girardot demonstrated an impressive water simulation inspired by Sea of Thieves. According to the artist, the simulation was made with Unreal Engine 4 and its VFX system Niagara, which was used to create whitewater particles. To create the waves, the author utilized a custom HLSL node with For Loop enabled. Additionally, Ghislain moved 128 Gerstner Waves computation to the Vertex shader and used high-density geo to get detailed Normal Maps. The simulation runs at around 90 FPS on 970GTX GPU.

You can check out more of Ghislain's projects and tutorials here.