All emissive textures render black on mobile android

I can’t seem to figure out how to get my textures back the way they were. I have been trying to optimize the game for mobile and I have completely broken it :(. I’m using all unlit emissive materials and had it working perfectly before.

Additionally, whenever I turn on mobile HDR the app just crashes before anything loads. I have previously had no problem exporting to my android device using mobile HDR or high quality lighting settings - just minor lag. I would love to once again have the option of turning on HDR. When I play using the mobile preview everything renders just fine.

Here are my settings:

Here is an example of one of my super basic materials that dont require lighting:

I am so confused and have literally spent the last 5 hours enabling/disabling rendering settings and uploading to my device.

So after an excessively long painful period of testing I figured it out. I could not be more frustrated with the answer either. I simply had to restart UE4 after changing target hardware settings.

If I don’t restart UE4 after changing “Target Hardware” settings, the app exported to android will be wonky to say the least.

I have replicated this many times. I change target hardware, export to android and all the materials will render as black or the game will crash before even opening. Saving and rebuilding lighting doesn’t fix it either. I restart UE4, export to android without changing ANY settings and it works.

If the developers read this: PLEASE add a “you may need to restart UE4 for these changes to take effect” warning when target hardware is changed. It would be so simple and would hopefully save someone else from this nightmare.

As thrilled as I am that my game is fixed, I am also unhappy that I spent pretty much the entirety of yesterday night changing lighting settings, changing target hardware, rebuilding lighting, saving, exporting and keyboard smashing countless times. The only thing I took away from the ordeal was “turn it off and on again”.

I’m going to mark this as the correct answer in hopes that it may save someone else hours of their life.

Hi . i have the same problem. can you help me? i did not get the solution from your explanation

Hey saeedc,

Could you provide me with the device you are testing, and some simple steps so I can reproduce this in a blank project?

I am also going to need the version you are testing in as this bug was created in 4.7 which has been almost a year since that release.

Thank you,

I simply needed to restart the editor after changing my target hardware settings (ie. Maximum Quality → Scalable/2D) in project settings. Since I had the issue in 4.7, the feature I requested has been added (thanks guys :)). You will be prompted to restart the editor if you want the changes to take effect.

You may be experiencing a different issue if restarting the editor and re-exporting doesn’t work for you.