Depth of Field Issue 5.5 - NEW Black Edge Artifacts

Development Rendering
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Hi there.

I’m about to throw my entire set up in the bin, join the Amish Community, and renounce technology as a whole after going insane over finding new errors upon errors when using any and all versions of UE 5… What have I done to upset the Unreal Engine Deities so much?!

I’ve never had this issue with using these same models, lighting, and settings in 5.4 (previous assets were migrated to the new version). However, with 5.5 I am experiencing horrendous black edge artificing when exporting through the MRQ with Depth of Field enabled. The editor shows DOF working perfectly, which adds to the frustrations. There’s no existing documentation anywhere online that shows any issues remotely similar to this.

01_Viewport
01_Viewport1530×1031 99.5 KB

02_Exported
02_Exported1920×817 61.5 KB

03_KeyframedFocus
03_KeyframedFocus1916×1035 156 KB

04_RenderPreview
04_RenderPreview1274×743 57.9 KB

This is what I have tried so far:

  • Nanite enabled/disabled.

  • Played with various Aperture and Focus Settings on Camera DOF.

  • Played with various Aperture and Focus Settings on Scene/PPV DOF.

  • Changed/updated Materials on all problem objects.

  • Tried different Sizes/Resolutions of export file/images.

  • Played with various Reflection settings in PPV.

  • Played with various Lumen settings in PPV.

  • Post Processing deleted doesn’t stop it.

  • Tried turning off/on Motion Blur.

  • Rendering Low, Medium, High, or Cinematic doesn’t remove the artifacts.

  • Deleting the Post Processing Volume doesn’t affect this render issue.

  • Deleting every light in the scene and re-adding them with the same/different settings does nothing.

  • Creating a new camera with the same/different settings does not fix the issue.

  • Rendering using Path Tracing results in the same issue.

  • Migrating all assets to a fresh project has not fixed the issue.

  • Switching from DX12 to DX 11 does not fix the issue.

  • Experimenting with enabling/disabling Anti-aliasing and increasing/decreasing Spatial Sampling or Temporal Sampling doesn’t do anything.

  • Disabling the Depth of Field entirely through Camera or PPV does remove the artifacts, but I cannot disable DOF for this project.

My most recent projects with Unreal Engine have been delayed for MONTHS while troubleshooting issues with hair/fur rendering, lighting artifacts, animation sequencer problems, and the list goes on. Can’t go through that much stress again over something so trivial.

Any and all suggestions welcome. If you can solve it, I’ll sneak your name in as an Easter Egg in the next episode to say thank you.

Cheers,

JRS

1 Like
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HOT DIGGITY I THINK I HAVE IT. And trust me to find it half an hour after posting, after several days of trial and error and yelling at the computer haha.

It was the most obscure setting, and no idea how this was even checked to begin with/why this previously didn’t affect scenes in 5.4 versions…

The solution looks like it was to disable Alpha Output in the Default Settings of your Project Settings and that seems to have eliminated the issue*. Woohoo!

6 Likes
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This just saved me! Thank you SO MUCH! DOF was breaking with black artifacts and it was breaking like pixelated but the alpha output setting fixed it! Big thanks!

1 Like
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Huge thanks! It’s always some random setting isn’t it? Hope you reported it as a bug too!

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■■■■ I was going crazy too! Thanks for the solution, I remember looking for the “Alpha through Tonemapper/Linear Only” checkbox in 5.5 and couldn’t find it, but found that “Alpha Output” checkbox and thought it was the same but renamed. It was driving me NUTS!