Personally, I like the 2nd shot more, but the biggest thing I imagine you’ll run into is people seeing it at this phase and go, “Well if it’s a koi pond, where are all the koi?!” and I don’t think you wanna have to explain that a million times over. With the composition of the first, you can kind of get fake it since you’ve got the waviness of the water and some shadows/reflections happening so it’s not as immediately detectable.
But once it’s done - and the koi are presumably added - I’d roll with shot #2.









I have never tried making cg water, would you mind sharing how you made it?