About the simulation.
I have seen many many many Realflow, PhoenixFD, Naiad, FumeFX and BiFrost particle sims and I always notice all of those sims do 1 simple thing blatantly utterly annoyingly extremely wrong:
ALL have a way too high wave frequency
Serious?? You spend sooooo much time on research and you nail nearly every aspect of simulation, but then completely 100% FAIL with the very very basic thing of a beach wave, the wave frequency, which makes it look SO INCREDIBLY FAKE