My name is Till and I’m mainly a sound and music guy and therefore pretty much a noob in Unreal Engine and 3D in general. Also this is my first posting in this community. So forgive me if I posted this to the wrong category or something like that. Here to learn!
My issue:
I’m using Unreal Editor 5.5.4 on a Mac M4 Pro chip and everything worked like a charm until I started importing material textures. It instantly crashed on me and after trying out around I found out that it crashes every single time when I import normal maps, no matter the size….
My specs:
Mac mini M4 Pro
64GB RAM
MacOs Sequioa 15.3.1 (24D70)
My approaches so far:
Tried turning it off and on again
Installed and tested on an older UE version (5.4.4)
Reinstalled and ran X-Code in case any components were not initially installed
Disconnected 2 of my 3 monitor displays
Used different kind of textures and normal maps from different companies
One forum (the only post I could find with the exact error) proposed the following solution: „Just go to Plugin and uncheck Oodle Network and Oodle Texture“ which led to me not being able to open my project at all without crashing…
My questions:
What could this issue be?
Are there any settings I should change in general when working on Mac M4?
Welcome, Till! And thank you for such a detailed first post—great breakdown of the issue.
The normal map crash on import you’re seeing may be tied to a texture compression incompatibility, especially with Apple Silicon and certain compression plugins (like Oodle or specific texture formats like BC5 or DXT5).
Here are a few things you can try:
Disable virtual texture support temporarily in your project settings before importing.
Try importing the normal map as a regular 2D texture first, then switch its compression settings manually after import.
In the Texture Settings, try setting Compression Settings to VectorDisplacementmap (RGBA) or Default to see if the crash still occurs.
Double-check if Texture Streaming is enabled—disable it and try again.
If you have access to a Windows machine, try importing the same asset there first, save the project, then reopen it on your Mac.
Also, UE 5.5.x on macOS Sequoia is still in a bit of a grey zone—some stability issues on M-series chips have been reported (especially with Metal and texture decoding). Hopefully Epic patches this soon.
Let us know if any of those steps help stabilize things.
