Water Plugin crashes the Engine 5.4.1

Kaputtea7475 · January 15, 2025, 12:38pm

Bumping this. Testing in 5.4.4 in the VR template and created a new level. Having the crashing happen when I drag the water into the scene unless I turn off ‘Instance Stereo’ (for VR) and ‘Forwards Shading’ in the project settings.

I did see in another forum that someone was using r.water.waterinfo.rendermethod 2 to prevent the crashing but would prevent the water from rendering at all in editor or would make the water go all spikey when switching to another rendermethod (0 or 1) after the waters been placed.

I could get things working seemingly fine as soon as those as those two settings off but having instance stereo off is a bit of an issue for me as I may need it on for other reasons in the near future.

Has anyone done a bug report for this one? It is probably an engine bug that should be put forward to them if not already.

Kaputtea7475 · January 15, 2025, 12:41pm

Just tested the VR template in 5.4.4 yesterday and can replicate the issue instantly. I’m current on Windows 10. My Laptop is Intel i7 11th gen, RTX 3080, 32GB RAM. Can recreate the crash in another project also which is where we initially found the issue.

SupportiveEntity · January 18, 2025, 6:07am

Hey there @Kaputtea7475! Welcome back to the community! Thanks for the update, I can verify the issue is still occurring. It seems to be related to the way the water shader is rendered that is failing to be reproduced between the two viewports.

Fafhrd · January 29, 2025, 12:20am

I’m able to reproduce this crash in a non-vr project using the deferred renderer. As soon as I drop any water body into the world it crashes.

Running a Ryzen 7900X 32GB RAM, Radeon 7900 GRE 16GB, Catalyst 24.12.1 drivers, Windows 10. Unreal 5.4.4

Crash dump:

Assertion failed: CurrentGPUVirtualAddress != 0 [File:D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\D3D12RHI\Private\D3D12DescriptorCache.cpp] [Line: 659]

UnrealEditor_D3D12RHI
UnrealEditor_D3D12RHI
UnrealEditor_D3D12RHI
UnrealEditor_D3D12RHI
UnrealEditor_RHI
UnrealEditor_Renderer
UnrealEditor_RHI
UnrealEditor_RHI
UnrealEditor_RHI
UnrealEditor_RHI
UnrealEditor_RHI
UnrealEditor_RHI
UnrealEditor_Core
UnrealEditor_Core
UnrealEditor_RenderCore
UnrealEditor_Core
UnrealEditor_Core
kernel32
ntdll

It doesn’t crash if I run the editor as DX11, but the water also won’t render under DX11. And if I save the level and reload the editor in DX12 mode, it will crash on load.

Eanir · February 4, 2025, 7:10pm

It has been fixed, working ok in 5.5.2.

StoriedKnowledge · February 7, 2025, 9:46pm

Doesn’t work for me in 5.5.3.

Kaputtea7475 · May 15, 2025, 10:01am

Just wanted to come back to this one to see if there’s any update but I can see there hasn’t been.

Is anyone aware if there’s actually a bug submission that’s been done for this one as I cant find one and was wondering if one needs to be created.

serebr.s · June 7, 2025, 1:24pm

Tried it in version 5.6. The Water plugin no longer crashes, but the water is not displayed (or partially displayed) in editor and VR when Forward Shading enabled.

When Forward Shading disabled, water is visible in editor, but not in VR.

Kaputtea7475 · June 18, 2025, 8:03am

Hi all, bug tracker links have been created for versions 5.6+

Dayaern · June 21, 2025, 1:43pm

Just wanted to say that this problem isn’t VR related only.

I tried connecting a specific spline point (check the image) of my River Body with my Lake FROM outside a WaterZone collision, and the moment it hit the box, the editor crashed.

Blue Arrow (first spline point): No Crash
Red Arrow (second and third spline point: Crash

100% Replication success in 5.4.4.

What makes matters worse is that the issue seems to be related to my project only, even though it’s not a VR project. Both ‘Instanced Stereo’ and ‘Forward Shading’ are off and have been off since the beginning of this project.

Workaround: I either remove the lake or just extend the WaterZone before adding the River Body (that means that the River must be created already inside the WaterZone collision box) and it’s fixed. Still need to figure out what’s caushing the crash.

P.S.: Tried with a First Person template and had no issues. Not entirely sure what’s causing that crash on my specific project.

ScarBurst_173 · October 29, 2025, 3:44am

I know for a fact it worked with 5.3 without a hiccup. Once I upgraded to 5.5.4, all of my projects refused to work and went to hell (refused to work as in the projects work fine, no crashes outside of the normal buggy issues here and there, but in VR preview the waters gone/missing. Looks great in editor though). However, for some reason in one of my projects where I was/am using only POND and RIVER, they magically started working one day after Oculus took an update for the device a few months ago. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but I didn’t do it. They were invisible for months, I finally gave up on them and moved on to other aspects until I planned to create a work around, but then suddenly I was surprised to notice that it started working in 5.5.4 on its own. The pond and river that is.

However in 5.5.4 I can can confirm that its a no go within the water boundary using VR when it comes to OCEAN. I dont know even know for sure why or how the river/pond started working in one of my projects, but it did and currently does, with a few minor glitches. Sometimes when I start the map its gone and the landscape sculpt is all ugly in VR preview, then when I fiddle around with the water system turning visibility on and off and stuff like that, suddenly it’ll come to life when I use VR. I know its a gamble/risk using the water plugin for packaging anyways, so I’d imagine that even though it works sometimes in VR preview that’s a no go on packaging. This is so frustrating.

Make it make sense?

Kaputtea7475 · November 14, 2025, 11:28am

Just an update now that 5.7 has been released.

I tested a VR template project again to see if water is working for VR yet and it seems its still not rendering at all now.

I tested with a Quest 2. You can see it perfectly fine in editor but in VR the water doesn’t render at all. The settings I have active here is Instanced Stereo is enabled, Forward shading is off and the r.Water.WaterInfo.RenderMethod=1.

I tested r.Water.WaterInfo.RenderMethod=0 as well as well as turning on forward shading and they all result in the water not rendering.

Unreal Engine Issues and Bug Tracker (UE-296373) This issues has apparently been fixed but when I followed the steps and the water is in the scene and play as standalone with the stereo enabled like its says to do, if I play standalone game, the water does render but it never actually shows in the headset

If I play Standalone Game Mobile, it will crash the standalone instance.

Assertion failed: bIsViewFamilyInfo && SceneTextures->bIsSceneTexturesInitialized [File:D:\build++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Renderer\Private\SceneRendering.h] [Line: 1984]
FSceneTextures was not initialized. Call FSceneTextures::InitializeViewFamily() first.

Unreal Engine Issues and Bug Tracker (UE-296375) This one lists the issue as Unresolved so I it seems we will have to wait to see if it gets fixed in 5.8