I’m encountering an issue since I moved to Unreal Engine 5.5 (and higher) where textures and materials sometimes appear completely black. This affects both the previews in the Content Browser and the materials applied to meshes in the scene, causing the entire mesh to appear black. Strangely, the issue resolves itself temporarily when I manually open the texture in the editor, after which everything looks normal. Additional Information:
Current Engine version: 5.5.1
The issue occurs sporadically without a clear pattern.
Textures and materials appear correctly once opened manually in the editor.
Has anyone experienced a similar problem, or does anyone know potential fixes or workarounds? Could this be related to caching, rendering, or shader compilation? Any insights or guidance would be greatly appreciated!
I can assume you just switched the project from version 5.x to version 5.5? Or did you use a ready template from older versions and switch it? I did the same thing and got exactly the same problems, in almost all packs.
Try create a clean, empty 5.5 project from scratch and migrate/copy all the content you need. That should solve the problem.
Hey, i stumbled upon this bug today and i had to resave all the textures, just clicking Save updates the texture for me. Idk the source of this problem i hope it won’t appear again on resaved textures.
Happens a lot since 5.5. This is non VT textures by the way. I had textures load in editor very slowly on meshes, several seconds, refuse to load full resolution and sit on lowest mip. I had also textures turn black in content editor like mentioned here but also white. While clicking black textures in content browser causes their sudden load, the white ones reacted to the “preview platform” button that is in texture view. Is this one new? I switched to windows from editor platform and white texture loaded. It was checkerboard in the texture viewer before.
TLDR: Entire texturing in 5.5 is completely bugged.
I’ve been seeing the same issue with some members of my team.
We moved our project from 5.4 to 5.5. Each one of us is seeing a different set of black texture thumbnails in the content browser. We’re sharing via Perforce.
I was seeing if I could find a fix and went into the project settings
Engine->Rendering Overrides (Local)-> Force all shader permutation support = True.
On restarting the engine it seemed to have fixed the issue, still testing though.
You may want to go back and review shader permutations now that it’s working. If nothing else, having a bunch of extra shader permutations will increase your compile times unnecessarily.
As this issue seems to be to do with compilation/texture load errors, I’m currently testing a new BandAid; an editor utility widget that recompiles the materials of selected assets in the level by running a recompileshaders cmd.
Fingers crossed, will report back.
^This didn’t work.
Instead I made an EUW that gathers all the textures used for a selected mesh, opens an editor window for each, refreshes viewport and then closes. This works as a bandaid.
Currently testing with regen of DDCs.
There are no error messages in the material logs, simply because the material considers the texture to be black, so you see the broken material because one or more textures are loaded black. If you go back to the texture in the Content Browser the preview is black, if you double click on the texture it is “loaded” (made visible again) and the material continues to work.
Hey. Me and my friends have the same problem too.
This bug causes a lot of discomfort when we’re working with maps that use many texture unwraps, especially 4k or larger. When I move around the map, the textures don’t have time to load to maximum quality and then there’s a short freeze after which some of the textures just go black.
This problem occurs most often with 4k and higher resolutions, because it takes more time to load them.
