Every time I play in the editor all the textures are rendered differently. They almost never render completely in the way they’re supposed to. And sometimes there are major distortions. Everything looks fine when I’m editing. Basically all I’ve done is grabbed a few different free assets from the marketplace and Quixel and then placed a bunch of foliage into the scene. I turned nanite on all of them but other than that didn’t change anything on the meshes. What I did right before this started happening was add a skylight and turned the lux on my directional light down. I tried rebuilding lighting because that’s what I did right before it started happening. Whenever I try to build the lighting though the engine crashes and I get this error message
"Assertion failed: ExportSettings == *ExistingExportSettings [File:D:\build++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Editor\UnrealEd\Private\Lightmass\Lightmass.cpp] [Line: 546] Attempting to add the same material twice with different export settings, this is not (currently) supported
All of the meshes are using the materials they came with. I haven’t added any materials to anything other than the landscape. And I added that right at the beginning and it hasn’t given me any problems so I don’t think it has anything to do with the landscape material. Here’s a video showing what’s happening.
You’ve exceeded your texture steaming pool. Pay attention to the errors in the top of the viewport. Once you’ve exceeded the streaming pool budget, performance will go bad and textures can go crazy. Either increase the budget or decrease the memory you are using by lowering texture resolution or compressing them more aggressively.
I had actually read about changing the streaming pool size before. I probably should have tried that first. What I read about it didn’t suggest it could cause anything like this. And because it happened right after changing the lighting I guess I sort of assumed that wasn’t the problem. I have fixed the streaming pool size issue now but I’m still having the same problems with my materials not rendering properly. The fact that it’s crashing when I try to build the lighting makes me think it has something to do with that. Removing all light actors from the scene though doesn’t fix the crashing. It still crashes when building the lighting. Any other ideas?
I seem to have fixed both the crashing issue when building lighting and the texture issue. I started removing objects from the scene and found out that when my landscape wasn’t there lighting built fine. Undoing the delete of the landscape made it crash again. I was completely done with the landscape and hadn’t sculpted anything for a while. I’m really not sure why but all I had to do was sculpt in one area and it seemed to fix it. I was even able to undo the sculpt and then the lighting built. I noticed this when I tried putting another material on the landscape. It wouldn’t show the new material until I sculpted a new part. The texture issues were still there after fixing this though.
I didn’t mention that a few of the assets I was using that were from the marketplace weren’t created for UE 5.3 but for older versions. I had read that normally this isn’t an issue. Especially with meshes. It’s normally more for code plugins and blueprint libraries and things where there are issues. The materials that were on some of these meshes had fairly complex blueprints on them though. So I started to think maybe that was the issue. I put different materials on them that weren’t from content made for older versions and all the rendering issues went away. So I’m not sure 100% if it’s because they were made for older versions. But there was definitely some problem with the materials themselves. I’m assuming something within the material blueprint isn’t quite right for UE 5.3.
UPDATE:
I was wrong about the texture thing I guess. It seems that less complex materials just reduced the frequency of the issue. After pressing play on the editor a few more times it started happening again. I tried using other assets that were made for ue5.3 to rule out it being the mesh itself not being compatible for some reason. The issue was still there. I tried using a basic shape-a toriod-and the issue wasn’t there anymore. To be sure I made my own shape in blender with fairly complex geometry and the issue was there for that shape. So the complexity of the geometry seems to have something to do with it. I can add as many toriods as I want and it doesn’t seem to happen to them. Most meshes don’t show super drastic deformations like shown in the video. What tends to happen on 90% of the meshes is the material gets changed to whatever material is on my landscape. I put a basic dirt material on the landscape to rule out it being from the auto material I had on my landscape. The issue is still there. So it also seems related to my landscape somehow. Here’s a video.
Not sure why it doesn’t happen on simple shapes like cubes and toroids. Any ideas?
UPDATE:
I seem to have found some weird combination of things that was causing this problem. I created a few copies of my level to experiment with. In the video above I had changed all the materials to basic materials and it was still swapping materials when playing for some reason. In this instance all I needed to do to fix it was copy my landscape and paste it and then delete the original copy. The issue was gone after that. So I tried in a version where I hadn’t changed the materials. Copying and pasting didn’t work. What did work was changing the material on the mountain in the background to a basic material and then copying and pasting the landscape. So it seemed to be some weird issue regarding the materials on my mountain and my landscape. I was able to keep the auto material on my landscape though. Which makes no sense to me. I’m assuming it still maybe had something to do with the blueprints in the materials not being right for ue5.3. And for some reason, I just had to copy and paste the landscape for whatever the problem was to refresh itself. I’ve pressed the play button several dozen times now to make sure it’s not just a delayed problem. I’m like 95% sure it’s fixed now as long as I don’t use those materials. The weirdest problem I’ve ever seen with unreal tbh.
While the apparent material swapping seemed to mostly be fixed I was still having issues with my foliage not rendering properly. They would render as a Tanish color for some reason until I shot my gun several times-I added a gun since posting the videos-. Because of the crashes with lighting, I decided to turn off several settings related to lighting in my project settings. Specifically support stationary skylight, support low quality light map shader permutations, support point light whole scene shadows, and allow static lighting. Not sure which one of these fixed it cause I’m pretty new to the whole graphics side of programming but the problem is completely resolved now. I’ll have to go through each and find out what exactly it was and let you all know in case anyone else has a similar issue. I’m having these weird artifacts around the gun I added but that’s a separate issue that I’ll post about if I can’t find a solution.
That’s exactly what it was actually. Super weird. I’ll have to learn how to light my scene properly now without that cause there’s way too much contrast between the light and dark areas of the map.
Just found out turning the skylight to movable or static instead of stationary also fixes the issue. Also turning my trees to stationary instead of static fixes it.