Project can't be saved or packaged after changing rendering settings (Nanite / Lumen)

Development Programming & Scripting
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Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on my first Unreal Engine 5 project for a few months, and I finally decided to package it. Before packaging, I wanted to optimize the project a bit, so I changed some rendering settings:

  • I disabled Lumen and other related rendering features.
  • I enabled Nanite on individual meshes.
  • I also tried disabling global Nanite and re-enabling it.

I installed Visual Studio to prepare for packaging, but packaging failed. There were no error messages in the Output Log.

At that point, I noticed my Visual Studio version was the latest one, which might not have been fully compatible with my version of Unreal Engine. So, I uninstalled it and reinstalled the version recommended for UE5. However, even after reinstalling the correct Visual Studio version, packaging still failed.

Since then, several strange things started happening:

  • The Windows icon during the packaging process didn’t change.
  • I can no longer save my project at all, even if I open it and make no changes.
  • Restarting Unreal Engine or my PC does not fix it.

I suspect this started after I changed some rendering settings (especially related to Nanite). I also get this error when launching or building the project:

Nanite is enabled, but rendering is not working because it’s disabled in the project ini file (r.Nanite.ProjectEnabled=0).

It seems like Nanite is enabled in the editor, but the engine still considers it disabled because of the config file.

Any ideas on how I can fix this? I’m stuck and afraid my project might be permanently broken.

Thanks in advance for your help!

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Hi @e7de84f7c71249dc8a21a7d1f05899f3,

Yeah, I can’t really tell you directly why your packaging is failing without any sort of logs. If you see any red text when trying to package, please post it here.

The bug preventing you from saving your project is very concerning. If you can’t solve this problem, I would suggest trying to move all of your content into a new project- just start with a clean slate.

As for the Nanite issue, there are a few different places where it can be enabled, so I’ll go through all of them and you can make sure it’s enabled everywhere just to be safe.

The first is the easiest- it’s just in your project settings.

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image764×242 3.97 KB

Also run the console command r.Nanite 1.

Save and restart your project. Then, open up the Default Engine Config and if there are no cvars about Nanite, add these:

r.Nanite.ProjectEnabled = true
r.Nanite = 1

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image695×316 17 KB

Good luck! Let me know how this goes.

1 Like
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Thank you very much for your detailed and thoughtful guidance.
Based on your advice, I tried several things, and it turned out that the issue was indeed due to a lack of administrative permissions.
After changing the file properties of the project and granting my user account full control, everything was resolved successfully.
I truly appreciate your help—thank you again!