Foliage always black or incredibly dark

Development Programming & Scripting
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1

Im new to unreal and I am having an issue with foliage being black no matter the distance, mesh, or material. I have searched everywhere for answers and have found no-one with the same problem as me. I am running Unreal Engine 5.1 on a 2022 MacBook Air which is running macOS Monterey 12.6.2 This issue occurs to megascan foliage as well as foliage from asset packs I own. Is there anyone who knows what to do?

Photos for reference:

Screen Shot 2023-02-05 at 9.06.49 PM
Screen Shot 2023-02-05 at 9.06.49 PM1920×1249 271 KB

Screen Shot 2023-02-05 at 9.17.50 PM
Screen Shot 2023-02-05 at 9.17.50 PM1920×1249 220 KB

2

Hmm, I would suggest the following:

  • Make sure that your graphics card drivers are up to date and that your graphics card is compatible with Unreal Engine 5.1.
  • If the problem persists, try testing the foliage in a new project or in the Unreal Engine example content to see if the issue is specific to your project.
  • Try lowering the quality settings in the project, such as the graphics quality and the foliage quality, to see if this resolves the issue.
  • Make sure that the foliage material is configured correctly. Check that the material properties, such as the base color, emissive, and roughness, are set correctly.
  • Verify that the lighting settings in your project are correct and that the foliage is being lit properly.
  • This could also be an issue with Mac, however I don’t have much information as I am a Windows user.
3

I am having the exact same issue. I am running UE 5.1.1 on a topped out iMac M1. Everything else is working well. All Megascan plants are black. Other Megascan items are fine. The project I am working on is very reliant on foliage as part of the script. I am also new and have no idea for correct configurations for the material properties thinking that they should be correct from the Megascan shop. Thank you for any detailed help with this.

4

I had a similar issue. The problem most likely deals with virtual textures and there’s a few solutions. The easiest is to enable Virtual Textures support in project settings. However, there are times when you don’t want VT and just want to use regular. In the project settings, set the Auto Import size to something above 8k and disable VT on import to avoid importing VT materials(doesn’t work 100% of the time).

The biggest benefit I see of VT is to sample materials from other actors. For example a rock with the same material will have snow on it when placed on snow biomes and moss when placed on swamp biomes automatically. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the benefit of Virtual Textures deals with pixel overdraw on partial visible meshes. With VT the GPU will only draw the visible portion of the material. However, I’ve heard that nanite does the same.

Alternatively you don’t have to work with VT, with materials like MegaScans they often have a VT material and a regular material. You would need to switch out the materials (may need to temporally disable VT support and re-import).

Other assets may rely on a Runtime Virtual Texture of the landscape. Usually, their material instances have a bUseVT option or something similar, if not it’s easy enough to implement.

Mac may not support VT, I could be wrong. As a work around, you can dual boot Windows on a Mac machine, the benefit being windows is a better suited tool for working with UE. Then you’ll have one machine with Windows and IOS and can swap out depending on the appropriate tool for the job.

1 Like
5

It turns out that if I change the LOD to 1 , all is okay.