Unreal 5 Visualisations are not working

Hello,

I came across a lot issues like:

  • Nanite Visualisation not working
  • Virtual Shadow Map visualisation not working

I gues you already tried How do you enable nanite or other pages like Nanite visualization don’t work or other…

I had this problems with not beeing able to visualise some view modes in Unreal Editor 5, that I ended up with reinstalling whole windows ( which “fixed” the issue :smiley: ). It took me some time to realize that there is one cause, which werent discussed on the internet and which is not even a bug, but rather option to set some things using - Unreals command line arguments.

Unreal has a lot of cmd argumenst which can provide you with advanced visualisation on your view render window. On Virtual Shadow Maps documentation page, there is this statement:

You can also enable visualization using the console (except in Shipping builds), which is useful for profiling and debugging a live game. If any of these are set in the editor, they override any mode selection made through the editor’s user interface.

This effectively means that you can overwrite editor visualisation with commands, which will be applied every time you visualise something, unless you turn these visualisations off again through commands.

The worst part (and this is for you unreal devs) editor will not tell you nor hint you that your editor visualise settings is beeing overwritten with console visualisation setting.

example:
ShowFlag.VisualizeVirtualShadowMap 0 will disable your Virtual Shadow Map visualisation


ShowFlag.VisualizeVirtualShadowMap 1/2 will enable permanent/enable your Virtual Shadow Map visualisation

You can find more of these settings in pages like Nanite documentation or Virtual Shadow Map documenation etc… Just look for visualisations.

Hope this helped.