Alpha Textures Disappear upon re-import

I have noticed a bug that anytime you re-import a texture with alpha it will completely disappear from the viewport (disappear from your objects, but still can see it in the content browser) until restart. This can get quite frustrating and time consuming when tweaking textures on the fly. Any word if this is known or will be fixed soon?

Hey Dynako -

Can you post some screenshots of what exactly is happening? I am having hard time reproducing this issue.

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Fully import your asset with textures, apply your material to the asset.

  1. Going back to photoshop to edit the leaf texture which has alpha, resave and export it.

  2. In UE4 fully reimport the texture (by clicking import button) overwrite the file with the new import.
    -You have to fully re-import from scratch because 80% of the time when you right click the texture and say “reimport” it doesn’t update properly.

  3. Now the texture with alpha will disappear from the asset.
    -This only happens to textures with alpha.

*Only way to fix it is completely restart editor. :frowning:

Once you restart the editor and load back up your map the texture will pop back in.

Hey Dynako -

The Material and texture are being created when you bring in the mesh, correct me if I miss understood you. Then you are editing the root texture that was assigned in your modeling program in Photoshop. I believe this is where the problem may be residing. After importing your mesh the first time, open the associated texture and look at the import directory, does it match the directory of the texture that you edit in photoshop?

Let me know -

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

With our workflow we have a master shader, so when we import an asset the only thing we bring along are textures. Then we instance off of our master shader material and by hand set it up with the textures it needs then applying that to the object.

After looking at said object i want to make adjustments to the texture; so i go back to photoshop and tweak the texture that is applied to the object. I then re-import the texture with the new adjustments using the import button, the texture/geo that the texture was assigned to will completely disappear until engine reload.

The root directory of the texture i am tweaking is pointing to the TGA, but in photoshop i am only tweaking the PSD and saving out the TGA. Then re-importing the TGA when i get to engine.

Does that summarize the workflow better at all?

Hey Dynako -

Thank you that actually helped a lot. Let me check one more simple solution, when you are saving the PSD version as a TGA are you making sure that you save it as a 32 bit TGA and not a 24 bit TGA? 24 bit TGAs do not save the Alpha Channel.

Let me know as I try to recreate the issue here -

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

yes i am saving it out as 32 bit

It seems a lot of times the texture wont actually update when i do the right-click method; so i just got in the habit of doing a full import(the full import works fine until you try it with a texture that has alpha). If i can reproduce the right click method i will post back the steps in which the bug occurs. Thanks again for your time!

Hey Dynako -

I was finally able to get a successful and reproducible reproduction of this issue for you. I have entered a report to our engineers and will keep you informed as we look for a solution.

It is still the favored workflow to right-click and reimport the texture which I find always works without producing the error above but you are saying that 80% of the time it produces an error, can you be more specific?

Thank You

Eric Ketchum