When in unreal Engine, the engine will lock up randomly while moving, and when it does, random objects lose their textures and become black.
To correct the black textures i simply open the texture in the content viewer and it goes back to normal.
how do i get the objects to not turn black in the first place?
UE 5.5.1
(On 5.5.0 UE had the word “PREVIEW” written across every texture, but this seems to have been fixed in 5.5.1, however now i have the new issue of stuff turning black?)
I had this exact thing after upgrading to 5.5.1. Open or reload the textures and it goes away. Quite irritating, but no idea why…
The other issue, is because you have some static lights in your scene, so the system is expecting you to build light. If you just make sure the lights are moveable, you will be ok.
I think I have the exact same bug above, and random stutter and random black materials, every time I open/close the editor the black materials are always different. If I open the material, the material suddenly becomes illuminated. I will try to disable the Oodle plugin (texture and network), I hope it works. I am using 5.5.1.
Update: Removing Oodle doesn’t totally fix it. This is some sort of low level, ongoing editor malaise…
Objects becoming black and shiny, is caused by textures suddenly appearing as black in the content browser. Doing almost anything ( opening them, for instance ), will fix it.
Textures suddenly becoming very low res. Again, a little more is needed to fix it. Changing almost anything in the texture editor will do the trick.
It’s almost like the editor randomly chooses 5-10 textures each time you start it, and decides they will be black / low-res. Very annoying.
Turning off Oodle does seem to make it happen less, but does no eradicate the behavior entirely.
I wanted to bump this post as I am having the same exact issue. It recently started happening since I updated to 5.5.1 / 5.5.2.
Just like @ClockworkOcean mentioned, I can fix the all black texture issue by opening the file in the content browser for that session. I’ve also tried disabling the Oodle plug-in and while it did decrease the amount of textures getting corrupted it hasn’t prevented it 100%.
Opening the texture that appears to be all black in the content browser to show the texture properly isn’t a permanent fix. This is because a completely different set of textures get corrupted on every single reboot.
In case this information helps, I’m having this problem when I minimize Unreal Engine AND open another resource-intensive program, usually games or other programs like Blender.
also I’ve noticed that when I minimize Unreal Engine for about 10 minutes, I have this problem when I come back.
The way I’m preventing it is by using ALT+TAB instead of minimizing Unreal Engine.
I guess this may be a problem caused by the code related to UE loading packages. This is related to the deserialization of disk files to object memory.
This may also require debugging with tools such as RenderDoc to see whether the ImageDescriptor referenced by those objects that randomly turn black at runtime has uploaded textures to the GPU.
In other words, one check direction is from disk to CPU, and the other check direction is from CPU to GPU.
I get the impression this is all happening right back at the asset manager level, before we get anywhere near the render pipeline. Because you can find the offending textures in the content browser, and they are indeed black. Opening them fixes it, but it will just happen later somewhere else…
It’s almost like a texture is requested, and asset manager just hands off a black square, and that makes it all the way along the pipe.
Hey @DazzaJay — thanks for sharing the video, and yeah… that’s a gnarly bug. We’ve run into similar issues during UE 5.5.x testing too — especially around materials going black or showing fallback shading until manually reloaded.
What’s Likely Happening:
This seems to be a streaming/rendering sync issue, where the shader or texture reference is momentarily invalid or skipped during viewport traversal (often triggered by memory spikes or engine state lockups).
Some Things You Can Try:
1. Recompile Shaders + Clear Derived Data Cache
– Sometimes stale compiled shaders cause assets to fail to resolve visually.
– Try: r.ShaderPipelineCache.Clear and manually clear the DerivedDataCache folder.
2. Increase Texture Streaming Pool Size
– Black textures can indicate streaming pool exhaustion.
– Console command: r.Streaming.PoolSize 2000 (adjust to your GPU VRAM)
3. Check for Engine Locks or GPU Driver Spikes
– If the engine freezes momentarily, and then assets lose state, it could be memory paging or driver latency. Monitor with stat GPU and stat RHI.
4. Disable Virtual Textures (temporarily)
– If you’re using virtual texturing, try disabling it as a test (r.VirtualTexture settings).
Bonus Tip: Keep Track of These Bugs Across Assets
In teams or larger scenes, this issue can hit some meshes and not others — which makes it easy to lose track of which materials are affected.
That’s part of why we built Asset Optics — a plugin that helps you:
Attach bug notes or comments directly to assets like “black material bug seen on this mesh”
Create checklists per asset for testing fixes across engine versions
Sync those notes with your web dashboard, so you don’t forget what was already debugged
Helps a ton when you’re testing across 5.5.0 → 5.5.1 and need to track visual regressions without relying on memory or screenshot folders.
Let us know if any of the fixes help — or if you want to share a project excerpt, we’d be happy to help isolate the root cause further!
What’s Likely Happening:
Some Things You Can Try:
Bonus Tip: Keep Track of These Bugs Across Assets
Attach bug notes or comments directly to assets like “black material bug seen on this mesh”
Sync those notes with your web dashboard, so you don’t forget what was already debugged