Refraction just stopped working.

Development Rendering
1

So i am working on a project in UE4 and i have some nice glass and water in the environment which i tweaked to look exactly how i like it with refraction working perfectly. I go through the map and make a few changes here and there then as I’m working, after one of the lighting builds i notice that the refraction is no longer working, it’s just using basic transparency.

At first i thought i maybe messed with the material but i didn’t so i decided to load another map which has refractive translucency and that wasn’t working anymore either so i decided to load an entirely different project and version of the engine and yet again all of the translucency was basic - At this point i decided to reinstall my graphics drivers which didn’t fix the problem either.

I have no idea what happened but it almost seams like the engine reverted to some sort of ‘safe mode’ or to a lower DX level, it’s very strange.

Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance!

2

I was able to fix it!

For anyone else who has the same issue - I deleted the Users/UserName/AppData/Loacal/UnrealEngine folder, most likely a shader cache problem since the engine rebuilt all of the shaders once i reloaded it after deleting the folder.

3

Just to add to this, ive run into several instances where this has helped. I never posted regarding this, but thought it was likely just me doing something stupid. Glad to hear that might not be the case!

4

The Shader caching is always prune to corruption. Just remember to flush it in case of visual errors that should be working but dont. Cache will regenerate on compilation.

5

Neat! Good to know.