I am stuck with a bug that never occured before, but now suddenly it does. When I try to assign a volume material to a Heterogenous volume, my game just crashes, however this setting is enabled in my engine settings. I use UE5.5 from the Epic Launcher.
I also tried creating an empty volume material but even that one crashes my editor.
Hey there @TristanPiejn! Particle volumes are always a bit finicky depending on your graphical environment. Sometimes they work amazingly, and other times they fail or have rendering issues. In this case however the full crash is a bit of an issue.
This seems to be an issue with the way scattering and shadows are being processed.
Are you using hardware raytracing? If so, does disabling it change anything?
Hmm, alright. Let’s try some CVars that could help sidestep the rendering issue. I still believe it to be related to the shadow handling, but it could be cascading from another portion. These CVars will possibly break functionality in some areas, but if they avoid the crash it will give us some solid information.
r.HeterogeneousVolumes.DepthSort 0
This disables transparency depth sorting. Probably messes up the look of the effect, but if the sorting is causing this, this action will show us.
r.HeterogeneousVolumes.IndirectLighting 0
Disables indirect lighting altogether for the volumes.
r.PathTracing.HeterogeneousVolumes.RebuildEveryFrame false
This is only for making sure the engine can’t check for the path tracing side at all, even if it’s not being used.
I tried your CVARs but still it’s crahsing. I also tried in a different UE project and the Heterogenous volume works there with the exact same engine version 5.5. But even if i take the exact same rendering setting from another project settings, my editor for the project I actually need the VDBs for will still crash. And I am using the sparevolume material form the engine content so I don’t think it’s the material but rather maybe something else..?
Since it’s working for other projects, there’s got to be either a setting or a caching issue.
Settings wise you can verify they are the same with the fresh projects, so I’ll focus on the caches.
First back your project up somewhere. Source control is best, but a copy will do if you don’t have any source control setup.
After backing up your project, delete these folders while the project is closed, and they’ll regenerate when you launch the project. This will rebuild a ton of cached data so it may take a bit.
Thanks a lot for the suggestion! I tried deleting these but still it will crash…
We work with source control, but we’re really clueless because it persists across the entire team. Do you think maybe this is some type of issue related to the project settings?
Once again I really appreciate all your time you put into it to help look into this issue.
I have try browsing again for this crash message but I still can’t find anything about it sadly.
I’ve never seen this specific issue, was just judging from the error message. I’ll have to check out the source when I get into office later and see if I can follow the chain. It might provide a bit more insight.
