Random textures turn black

[ClockworkOcean]

Back again, wondering if anybody has found the root cause of this.

During gameplay or while using the edtior, there will be a bit FAT hitch follwed by certain nearby objects just going a kind of shiny black. Hunting out the textures associated with the material, shows they have gone black in the content browser

This can be fixed by either opening them, or right clicking and using ‘reload asset’.

It’s REALLY annoying, and also happens after packaging.

A quick look at the log gives ( in this case )

So the system is obviously loading textures that have not been referenced recently. But it’s actually turning some of them black. Why!?

Anyone with a solution, please…?

[Sergey_Skyline]

I might have a different problem, but my investigation has led me to textures and DDC.

I’m using virtual textures, and in some random cases, textures become different: the material displays other textures instead, and on the game map, the material appears completely different.

And the funniest thing is that when migrating my working project from 5.5 to 5.6, I either get materials with the wrong textures (they can be temporarily restored by reopening the textures), or a bunch of different errors, for example:

Assertion failed: RecordTypeBaseOffset + SegmentIndex * 2 + 2 <= NumRecords

EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION reading address 0xffffffffffffffff (and other variations)

Assertion failed: SingleShaderBindings.ParameterMapInfo.TextureSamplers.Num() == 0

Crash in runnable thread RHIThread

…often in modules like:

UnrealEditor-Renderer.dll

UnrealEditor-RHI.dll

UnrealEditor-D3D12RHI.dll

I can’t reproduce the problem reliably/stably.

However, projects created directly in 5.6 don’t seem to have these problems (I’m not entirely sure). But all my projects migrated from 5.5 have various problems with materials, even if the projects were almost identical at different stages.

It seems I’ll have to revert back to 5.5, at least because of reflections (we have Nanite, but the reflections look like broken geometry and have AO artifacts. We have to disable nanite, lose performance but get high-quality reflections).

Overall, it’s a massive pile of issues that look like a tangled knot of nodes.

[ClockworkOcean]

It does sound related. Jumbling up textures is worse than turning them black!

Could it be that a mask texture ( which selects between variants ) is black?

I do think there’s a bug, possibly some sort of unchecked bound / overflow in this DDC.

I’ve seen others who have this after release!

[Leomerya12]

Have you run this at all through ChatGPT?

I’m on the Forums a lot less because it helps me work through bugs/scenarios in real time.

(Keep in mind, you can upload photos, scripts, crash logs, etc. to GPT.)

[ClockworkOcean]

Thanks for the tip

Not this particular thing yet, as literally EVERYTHING I ask GPT, it gets wrong

Telling me to use nodes that don’t exist, procedure that don’t make sense etc.