Materials are black on 4.14+

I am attempting to upgrade my project, but I can’t get it past 4.13 without most materials on my meshes turning black (or transparent?). I have tried 4.14.3 and 4.15.2.

I am willing to provide a download link for the project to Epic Staff to debug if that helps!

Here’s what it looks like in versions <= 4.13:

And here is what it looks like in versions >= 4.14 (note that some materials survive, but most are black)

I have:

  • 2 directional lights (no other lighting)
  • a post-process volume
  • An orthogonal camera
  • And simple materials like this (this is the body color of the spaceship):

Did you tried to rebuild lightning?

In 4.15 it uses additional _BuildData map to store lightning information.

If editor not find this asset for your map, everything that lit statically will be black

I rebuilt lighting. It made no difference in 4.14 or 4.15. :frowning: Thanks for the suggestion, though! Any other ideas for what I could try to fix it?

All my actors are placed dynamically during runtime, so I would have been surprised if building lighting made any difference anyway:

There was some changes with tonemapper, so maybe you need to check post process settings.

Both directional lights are movable?

Aha! That was it! The directional lights’ own mobility was set to static. That worked fine in 4.13 and earlier. Changing it to Movable fixes it in 4.14 and 4.15.

Thanks! You’re my hero today. :slight_smile: