Updated to UE 5.4 and now I'm dead

[BP_SpawnGato]

I have been working for a while to get things in my project looking good after updating to UE 5.4.4. I have to be on 5.4.4 because there are Android dependencies. Basically, my project is useless in the Android Dev Portal without it.

I’m officially at my wits end. Everything looks beautiful in the editor but when I package, it looks like every single material (save some few) have an unknown issue causing them to render crappy, almost like there is a shadow. I can assure you, it isn’t a shadow. Maybe a shadowing setting somewhere I haven’t thought of, but not a shadow in the literal way. At first, I thought this was Quixel assets only. But it isn’t. Here is what I have done so far:

1. fiddled endlessly with directional light. This has nothing to do with lighting i can confirm. Tried builds with spot lights and point lights. it has no effect.
2. Rebuilt materials from scratch
3. Resized textures
4. Found a thread that talked about Oodle being an issue. disabled it
5. disable a slew of other plugins
6. changed LOD Bias
7. For the hell of it, imported MSPresets from another project to see if this would help with Quixel assets
8. enable/disable texture streaming
9. turned off nanite
10. force no pre-computed lighting
11. Confirmed no problem on 5.1.1, 5.2.1, and 5.3.2 (Obviously I can’t use any of these versions)
12. played with mobile shader permutation settings
13. tried deferred and forward shading
14. Lumen off (none for global illumination)
15. Reinstalled engine multiple times

List goes on to some of the most minute, unlikely to help changes imaginable. I am hoping someone here has had a similar experience and can help me figure this out.

Here is some in-editor v.s. packaged shots for reference:

[Leomerya12]

You might want to take a look at this:

Upgrading to Unreal Engine 5.1 Breaks Lighting

I have 5.1.1 on my MacBook Pro. I have some meshes grayed out and others are over exposed and when I build the lighting it fails and never goes over 0% progress. If the moderators wants to reproduce the problem, I’m just observing the Assetsville Town that I just downloaded from the Marketplace and the lighting is broken in it.

And this:

4.11: Packaged game lighting very different from editor or standalone game

I have recently upgraded my project from 4.10 to 4.11.2. Everything was smooth and the game in the editor looks exactly the same as in 4.10. In standalone game everything is perfect. But when I package the game, the lighting is very broken. First of all, the skylight is either missing, invisible or completely dark. No trace of it at all, which completely destroys the lighting. Even if I delete it and recreate it from scratch I can’t get it in the packaged game. They appear perfectly in the edito…

If neither of these helps, I would suggest you try packaging a backup version (prior to 5.4) to make absolutely certain it’s the upgrade causing the issue.

[BP_SpawnGato]

Thank you for the reply. I tried different engine versions (5.1.1, 5.2.1, 5.3.2 - i can’t use these) and it is confirmed working fine. Force no precomputed lighting stays on in my project. I don’t see any other suggestions in those posts.

[Leomerya12]

The only other thing I can think of, given your useful rundown, is that the scalability settings in 5.4+ may be different than the scalability settings in previous versions.

I think, by default, it’s set to EPIC, but you may need to run a console command in a Blueprint to make ABSOLUTELY certain the scalability settings in the packaged game are identical to the scalability settings in the Editor.

[BP_SpawnGato]

So you got me thinking. I hadnt put much focus into lighting in general, and so i decided to attach a few hyper bright point lights to my character. Sure enough, these things light up when im near them. See examples:

This rules out a lot. Which is great! But i am still trying to figure out what im supposed to do to make these look right in packaged builds. My directional light is positioned perfectly, i have a skylight, and i added atmosphere with a skysohere just to make sure the light has something to bounce off of, just not sure how to configure light correctly here. Apparently everything i know about lighting in previous versions of UE is wrong now. Anymore expertise or suggestion is appreciated.