UE4 crashed, foliage is unselectable now

Development World Creation
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1

So I tried to change a setting on one of my tree assets, and instead of saving it, the engine just decided to crash instead. This, in turn, caused my entire project to become corrupted. Now, I’ve since managed to get my autosaves to open (very un-user-friendly system, by the way), but I have a myriad of other problems at the moment.

Despite losing an unfathomable worth of work (even though autosaves occur every ten minutes, and I purposefully save often under different file names), I now have to reassign about a thousand textures manually (even though they are all in their proper folders), track down all my building assets that I previously imported (even though they should have been saved with everything else), reposition EVERYTHING, because it’s all been removed from the scene, and lastly, I need to readjust my instanced foliage, as they are now at their default scale (which I changed weeks ago). To do this before, I simply selected them with the foliage painting tool’s lasso and scaled them down, but now when I click on my landscape and go to the foliage section, there are NO MESHES there. I can SEE the instanced meshes IN MY SCENE, but according to my landscape there are none. And I now have no way of selecting my trees, as they are not in the outliner either.

I have no crash logs for you, because there were none. The engine just crashed completely. As a side note, I had two species of tree in the scene, but one species REFUSES to find itself in the scene - the load errors log always says it cannot find the mesh, even though it is right there in the same place it always was (this is the species that I was trying to save when it crashed).

So is there a better solution to opening autosaves, so you can have your exact scene as it was at the time of the autosave, or should I just kill myself now?

Any solutions to any of the above problems may sway me back to the land of the living, but, man, am I ■■■■■■.

2

This may sound dumb, but its worked for me. Simply copy the landscape actor to the clipboard, delete it, and paste it into the scene. It might redo something things/reconstruct it and hopefully should be usable again.

If not, do you have a auto backup of the map you can restore to?

Lastly, you should look into using a backup/repository system. UE4’s backup system works alright, but if you have something dedicated to it, you wont have as many issues when you run into issues like this since you can literally just revert back to an earlier commit with the press of a button.

3

HI ,

  • Does this occur in a clean, blank project with no additional content or is it limited to one project?
  • What steps can I take to reproduce this error on my end?
  • Were you painting foliage or using a procedural foliage volume when the crash occurred?
  • When you say logs, do you mean there are no logs in the \saved\logs\ folder or that you did not get a callstack in the crash report window?
  • Did you check your saved\backup\ folder to see if there were backed up assets?
  • Are you using source control, such as P4? This is highly recommended to prevent losses in work such as what you have described above.
4

I tried the copying solution, and it didn’t work, the landscape still says there is no foliage. And I have been opening auto-backups since my crash, and getting the results I posted above - incomplete messes, that have a crazy amount of inconsistencies between each file.

For an alternate backup system, is there a way I can actually backup the PROJECT file rather than just the maps? That seems like it would make WAY more sense, I don’t understand why this is not the case already. Any other program, 3D or otherwise, if you open from a backup, everything is EXACTLY as you left it when the backup occurred, so why is UE4 different?

Thanks

5

Source control is handled through third party software, such as perforce or Tortoise SVN. You can find more information on how to setup a connection to source control from the editor once you have it active on your machine here:

6

Not really sure if a blank project would reproduce this, as I had a bunch of foliage in the scene at the time, and then tried to save the tree asset. If you tried to reproduce the error, I suppose you would have to have a scene with a lot of trees, then try to change the lightmass resolution of them (I turned them down from 16 to 8).

I was not using the foliage tool at all when the crash occurred. I was just trying to fix flickering shadows.

I did indeed find logs saved in the saved folder, hopefully they can help. I don’t see an option for spoiler tags here, so I’ll paste the log below this reply.

There are assets in the backup folder, I have so far only copied the assets from my Autosave folder into my Content folder. Should I copy the Backup assets to the Content folder as well?

I had no idea Source Control was even a thing until I Googled this issue. Is there a reason it’s off by default? Seems like it would be helpful.

7

Turns out the call log exceeds the character limit of AnswerHub. Anywhere I should post it?

8

link text

9

You can upload the saved .txt here and I can look at that.

10

Do you have a sample project this is occurring in I can take a look at?

11

I could probably send you the project mess around with, but I’m not sure how to send the entire thing to you.

Also, I’ve been trying to pick up the pieces of this disaster and have noticed that ALL of my foliage (grass, trees, bushes, etcetera) are now lumped together as one “InstancedFoliageActor”. But it has no settings I can really edit (it’s not even in the Outliner). Can I reverse this?

12

Hi ,

You can send me a copy of the project by uploading it to an FTP service and providing me the link.

The second part of what you are seeing is intended functionality. Technically, all foliage instances are instances of a single actor, this limits the number of draw-calls made to improve performance. All instance information has to be edited through the foliage window when you want to edit specific instances. However, if you need to remove your foliage actors, you can delete the InstancedFoliageActor and it should remove all foliage instances from the map.

13

I’m uploading it, but it’s taking forever. Might be a while…

I get that UE4 groups the foliage together as one actor, what I don’t get is why it’s detached itself from the landscape, and is now uneditable. My ability to keep living kind of depends on me getting this project restored, so I’m very stressed.

Thanks

14

Hi ,

Have you been able to get the project uploaded? I’ll be happy to take a look once you have.

15

Hey, , most of it is uploaded now, just a couple more folders to go…

16

Done. There are some umaps with “RESTORE” in the name, which are ones I have been manually restoring. Just to avoid any confusion.

17

Hi ,

I need the decryption key to be able to access the file. Please post that here so I can access the file and take a look. If privacy is a concern, you can send me a private message on the forums once the forums are back to live (as of writing this they are currently down). Once I receive the decryption key, I’ll be happy to continue.

18

Oh, sorry, I thought the selection “without key” meant I could just share it without the need for a key.

Anyway, here is the key. !HmF5jE0fs5ls0V6AuKqc4g

And the link again, just in case. MEGA

19

Hi ,

Unfortunately, this FTP service is not allowing me to download the files. Do you have a google drive or dropbox account I could pull this from? What is the size of the project? Do you have anything that is not necessary in the project that can be pulled to make the project smaller so I can download it?

20

Hm, it already took me about a week of continuous uploading to get the project on Mega. I’m not really sure what I could cut out from the project.
At this point, I’ve almost entirely restored what I lost manually, so I’m not sure it’s worth it now. It was difficult and took a long time, but I can more or less work again. So I think we may as well just give up.

Quick question, though: is cloning my project in the launcher a good idea for backing up? In case another corruption happens? I’ve got Source Control up and running, but it’s quite slow, and I’m very paranoid now.