Unreal Scene Looks Washed Out

[anonymous_user_0a83de8a]

I have a scene in unreal that I’ve been working on, and I’m starting to notice that assets in my scene are looking a lot worse overall than they used to.

For example, if I put the fire particle system from the starter content folder into my scene it looks like this:

However when I put that same fire in a new starter project it looks like this:

As you can see the fire in my scene looks opaque, and it has a strange orange glow around it.

Things I made sure of and tried to do to fix it:

All post processing is turned off.
Engine scalability settings are both the same.
I turned off all lights in my scene, still the fire looks the same.
Tried scaling the fire, no better result.
I put the fire outside the building on the open floor with nothing in the frame but the fire, and it still looked the same.

This is not the only asset this is happening to. I notice a lot of my highlights are looking blown out like this, where they looked smooth and sharp before.

If you have any suggestions or ideas what could be happening it would be much appreciated. Thank you!

[anonymous_user_0a83de8a]

After a few more hours of troubleshooting I found the answer. It turns out my textures began automatically down-sampling as ue4 felt that I was using too much memory.

I don’t know where the system variable can be set for global allowed memory usage, but I did find out that you can disable “streaming” (auto downsampling) for textures by double-clicking on the texture. When the texture window pops up under the details tab look for the “texture” tab and click the checkbox that says “Never Stream”.

This will keep your textures sharp and crisp regardless of the global memory texture sized allowed for your project.