Unreal Engine: Initializing stuck @45% after selecting "Clear Coat Enable second normal"

Development Rendering
1

Good day.
I am following:

and when I activated the Clear coat enable second normal, I restarted as per instructed it froze @45%. I’ve seen issues for a long stretch of time, but the thing is, this is a blank clear of content scene. Not even a shader to load.
Any ideas?

2

Shaders != materials, so even if your scene is empty, the shaders used for rendering(shading models that drive materials, post-processing, fog, etc.) need to be rebuilt based on the various permutations enabled/disabled in the project. How long have you waited? I usually have to wait awhile and it does routinely hang on 45% and then again in the 90s, but I run my engine on a fairly old HDD.

3

Thanks,
Been waiting for an hour or so, I’ll wait longer, just wanted to make sure it was ok!
I have an ssd so there shouldn’t be any speed issues if that’s what it’s using.

4

Open the task manager and if you see a bunch of ShaderCompilerWorker.exe entries, it’s just UE4 building the shader variants for the features you enabled. It will happen only the first time.

This process is mostly CPU-bound, however. On a desktop i7 it can take a couple minutes, but on something like an ultra-book i5 or i3 it can take a lot longer.

5

I wound up crashing, now it loads to 95%, and doesn’t do anything.

6

If the project is using ray tracing try these steps:

-Find your project location
-open Config
-Right click properties for DefaultEngine.ini
-Uncheck Read Only, apply Ok
-Open DefaultEngine.ini with any text editor
-Replace r.RayTracing=True with False, save file
-open project

The shaders will still need to load but it will not take nearly as long. In my case I’m running a 7700k and I spent an entire day trying to figure out a way around it after multiple computer crashes. I’m working with a team so we will need to turn ray tracing on a eventually, by then I should have a new cpu to handle loading the shaders. If you don’t need ray tracing from the getgo I recommend trying this out.

7

45% = Shader Compiler time, if you CTRL+ALT+DEL you should see lots of shader compiler workers working.

Project-Level settings usually mean every shader (engine included) in the project has to be rebuilt because of the new permutations.