How can I spawn a particle system at a dynamic objects location

Basically what I’m trying to do is create a water splash/ripple type of effect when the player walks into water. I thought of 2 ways to do this but nothing is working quite right.
Method 1
Make a BP with a plane that has the water material and the particle effect. Then set it up so that when the player overlaps the water it will play the particle effect at a specified actor location.
Method 2
Make a material function that uses the player location as a mask and then add the ripple effect to the normals of the water. Unfortunately I found no node that looked helpful.
I am a newb so this seemed like a good train of thought. guess not. the best I could do was to spawn a particle effect but it wouldn’t follow the player. I hope my node trees will give you an idea of where I was going with this. There are 2 images because I tried a few methods.