Fixing Common UE5 Issues! Changes in 5.0

In this tutorial we cover a few issues I've noticed since the release of Unreal Engine 5.0 that came out on April 5th! Notably Lumen Reflections, Glass/Raytraced Translucency, weird bugs with the Quixel Bridge, crashes, etc. This is intended to be more of a quick-tip kind of thing, I just wanted to get the information out there for those of you who might be having these problems.
Thanks for bearing with me!
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Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
01:18 - Important Project Settings
02:43 - Pathtracer Tips
03:42 - Quixel Bridge is gone?
04:11 - Lumen Tips
05:42 - Reflection Options
07:15 - New Lumen Reflection Options
08:58 - Raytraced Reflections
12:41 - Raytraced Translucency
15:21 - Outro and Recommendations
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[@WilliamFaucher]

A bit of a bonus tip, if you're experiencing bugs or crashes, ask yourself if you simply updated from Preview 1-2, directly to the full build. If you did, consider removing that, and installing UE5.0 again from scratch. It's helped me and a few others. Good luck!

[@stockbridgeworks]

Hmmm, I updated all the way. Will do as you suggested.

[@WilliamFaucher]

@@stockbridgeworks If you don’t have any issues you don’t need to!

[@MostafaAhmed-bp7ce]

I have indeed experienced *alot of crashes* which was really strange considering it was working fine with preview 1 & 2, imma definitely try that thanks

[@stockbridgeworks]

@@WilliamFaucher I have had crashes tbf, so just eliminating potential issues 🤗

[@battosaijenkins946]

@William Faucher, Thanks for the video. I really want to enjoy UE5, as I installed it from scratch on a monster system (12900k + rtx 3090 FE) but I'm crashing all the time. And I'm coming from OpenGL C++ developer who never had problems before. I guess they're still ironing out the kinks but it's difficult to get into it when you're learning the ropes and either A) Takes forever to compile all the shaders and/or B) It crashes or freezes for no reason on a migration or even a simple save! Ugh...

[@egretfx]

so helpful, I really appreciate having you in the industry!!💙

[@RobinDale50]

This guy is an absolute master when it comes to lighting in UE (among many other advanced skills).

[@WilliamFaucher]

You're way too kind :)

[@RobinDale50]

@@WilliamFaucher And you are way too skilled and talented to be giving all this for free! (But I will take it! Has helped me tremendously)

[@acsomiT]

​@@RobinDale50 The generosity of sharing, not necessary for a monetary purpose, never made a knowledgeable man poor, contrary. I know a couple of very successful people who are one of the most generous people I ever met when it comes to sharing knowledge for the joy of it! ☝

[@Billy-sj4vr]

Thank you so much as always for your incredible teaching style. It's so easy to understand the concepts that you're talking about. I've already learned so much from you in the past year!

[@BatnobieX]

I spoke on a pannel at magfest 2022! and recommended people to view your channel as it has helped me learn a fair few things. Thank you for all the content you do!

[@Monoville]

Great vid, very helpful! I think I mentioned this on one of your previous videos, but for anyone wanting proper ray traced translucency on car windows with realistic reflections, max refractions has to be set to 1 in the ray tracing translucency section

[@essamibrahiem2896]

Hello William, I was waiting for this my man !!!, thank you so much. Just wanted to tell you that regarding the part where you said that we lost the shadows for translucent objects in UE5 although we had it in UE4, for me it worked as expected when i checked "Cast Ray Traced Shadows" in the Directional Light details panel. I wish you the best and please keep up the good work !!!

[@mata6273]

By far the most helpful tutorial have seen. I have tried many other turorials and forums (including Reddit) and this is the only one that allowed me to display translucency in my viewport.

[@Flipside3D]

I was struggling with reflections and translucency in a render test couple of weeks ago, thank you for covering these points!

[@owenjenkinsofficial]

This helped sooo much! I did notice, all ray traced translucency shadows still work in the method standalone ray tracing, but not in lumen as you stated. Hope that they have a fix for this soon! Does look like Alberts comment I responded to has a partial fix!

[@dwayneserjeant3582]

Thanks for all the tips and hints, tutorials etc. Great job and much appreciated by us all (I'm sure!)

[@whovisionsCGI]

Another invaluable guide. Being a newbie to UE5.1 I have so much to learn and I don't think I'll remember it all so thank goodness for these tuts to look back on. 👍

[@thatmultimediaguykwik8529]

Thank you William, I appreciate and respect your knowledge. The things you taught about using the cameras in Unreal, I took to other programs, my renders have never looked so good, thanks again!

[@bobtruck1594]

Good job bro. Recently switch to full time ue5 in production. Will give vray, corona and the other gangs a break and try to master this game engine. So much potential!

[@cipriansocaci923]

William, your tutorials are a lifesaver! So much useful, clear information at every step of the way. Your channel is my go-to whenever I'm stuck in Unreal Engine. Thanks for the amazing guidance!

[@rickdrummond8317]

Thank you so much William. Your video also solved a ghosting issue that I had with window frames. The fix was changing PostProcessVolume/Translucency/Type to "Ray Tracing" instead of “Raster”. Thank you. Thank you . Thank you. ;)

[@TirickCFire]

I know this is an older video but you solved a nagging issue I was having with translucent cloth artefacts. Ray Traced translucency in the Post Process volume cleared that right up. Thank you!

[@PiyushYankee]

I was frustrated with UE 5 and I knew I had to wait for your video to get through the obstacles, thank you so much for clarifying things.

[@rohanmandke1920]

Awesome ! WIlliam, Thanks for the detailed explanation. A perfect video. Yes as you mentioned about glass, and shadows, its still a problem and not sure how to render all together when glass body is there in the scene.

[@WilliamFaucher]

Yeah it is not a perfect solution, gotta pick and choose what works best for you!

[@DIRECTEDbyRAY]

Thanks William for clarifying those settings. I noticed an issue with dof acting wacky, will take your advice to remove and do a fresh install!

[@MPRX87]

I probably sound like a broken record on your videos, but you're a serious MVP with your tutorials and tips! Keep up the amazing videos!

[@andreacelia4599]

YOU ARE THE BEST!!! Thank you so much Bro for all your awesome Tips and Tutorials!

[@NarcisoOliveiracg]

Congratulations for the amazing content and full of information. I'm a graphic designer and 3D artist. Without a doubt it was the clearest video I've seen to date talking about the subject of Reflection and Refraction within UE5. Thank you. I learned a lot!

[@WilliamFaucher]

Ah thank you so much! I will definitely be covering these topics more in depth once the kinks are ironed out in UE5's new systems :)

[@stefevr]

Also a useful tip: Unreal 5 has a "favourite" section, for instance if you use "exposure" a lot on a post process volume, right click the exposure section and you will see "add to favourites", the exposure section is now always at the top, super useful to not scroll down anymore for the sections you like, plus once you do that it's applied to all the future actors you will place later in any scene, in this case all the future post process volumes you place will have exposure in the favourites. hope this helps!

[@victorblanchard7774]

Nice one!

[@stefevr]

@@victorblanchard7774 Cheers! Happy it can help people

[@liverenders]

Wow thanks!

[@TFMHCR2]

🤯

[@stefevr]

@@TFMHCR2 i know right

[@snookofficial7211]

This video is gold, please don't ever remove it, it's helped me a couple of times solving different issues!

[@alexanderkartashov8776]

As always, you're the best ^^ Haven't got any issues with UE5 yet and with this video i'm prepared for some of them now haha XD Oh i had a little confusion when i haven't found displacement on my new landscape, but it's not a big deal for now.

[@MrHannessie]

Hey, This is such a great tutorial! I learned so much, Thank you!

[@wafflesoft]

What a great tutorial. I love the way you explain look here as I change this. I wish I wasn't having soo many issues with ue5 this would be super useful. Using a 1080 card. Moving my project from ue4 to ue5. I got huge FPS drop even after disabling the new features like vsm and lumen.

[@WilliamFaucher]

Cheers! Yeah the 1080 is started to feel a bit dated at this point, especially if you're using raytracing, it really isn't made for that!

[@NicolasSilvaVasault]

this totally goes on my fav on youtube, super useful stuff

[@chriswaters1480]

Hey William, super helpful as always, great tips thanks so much! Just wondering if you know anything about the Quixel Mixer to UE5 workflow, obviously can't export from the bridge application anymore and the in-built bridge doesnt seem to have a 'mixer' tab for custom materials. Cheers mate, keep doing what you do

[@OlavSchneider]

Subbed, great video so much details, this would have taken me hours if not weeks to figure out by trying my self. Great thanks!

[@WilliamFaucher]

Thanks so much! Welcome to the community!

[@AlessandroSchiassi]

You can put "Hit Lighting for Reflections" as Default if you go in Project Settings - Rendering - Lumen - Ray Lighting Mode and switch it there. This way that would be the default for every Post Process Volume you are adding to your scene.

[@PeteDimitrov]

Informative and to the point. Thank you!

[@Radwalls]

Having to come back to this video even in slow motion speed. Great video to learn on!

[@kritikusi-666]

super informative. Thank you!

[@StormX312]

This video was useful to me as someone relatively new to UE and Lighting. Thanks!

[@WilliamFaucher]

Cheers! Thanks for watching!

William you are the best one channel unreal engine on youtube I will join to support you man big thanks

[@pwnisher]

You're just the best William.

[@WilliamFaucher]

Oh stop it, you!

[@Catthyp]

Priceless Thank you

[@jonbonjovi38]

wow, thanks for the help . that's a huge help !! you're good !!

[@krzysztofbogdanowicz4543]

Great explanation - thank you very much !

[@sams_3d_stuff]

Long time follower William. Let's go for the 100k sub. I pray It'll come fastt so more People can enjoy your great teaching blessing

[@PTMTerror]

This is some master degree quality content right here Professor Faucher. Colleges would be jealous.

[@OverlandBound]

Perfect vid perfect timing

[@luisfgp80]

Just the reflections tips saved me hours, thanks a lot WF

[@ffabiang]

Thank you so much for this video, it was very helpful

[@andrewwells290]

Thank you so much, it was really helpful!

[@unrealengineruseng9583]

Very good tutorial! Thank you !

[@stockbridgeworks]

Thanks for this my man! Can't wait for more tuts from your badass self 🤗 Can I ask your opinion on how a GTX 1650 performs with UE5 on a laptop? Compared to my older 2x GTX 1070ti's.

[@philipsloth6600]

You are heavily underrated William, thank you for this video.

[@AZmaybe9]

Man, wish Lumen had more options for ambient occlusion controls. Even using the Raytraced AO I need on top of it would fix my issues because it's completely missing on dynamic characters. Only thing it allows is material AO and that has been a nightmare to bake and setup. (No idea why AO becomes a metal hike material when baking a static mesh AO) Lumen + Raytraced AO on dynamic characters would be perfect!

[@oxygencube]

Excellent job once again! 👍👍👍

[@heaven81100]

Exactly what i want. Great Work.

[@dreamaera]

Super informative for beginners, subscribed :)

[@WilliamFaucher]

Thank you! Welcome to the community!

[@amilcarmarta8316]

Good morning, your videos are spectacular, I always watch when one comes out, with a lot of content, and well explained. I have a doubt the GTX1060 6g graphics card, does it work with this tip?

[@DominikMorse]

William, the best Unreal Guide.

[@WilliamFaucher]

Thank you!

[@mattd2129]

these videos are the absolute best. thanks Mr.F.

[@robg5769]

William strikes again! the best in the tube!! thank you :)

[@virtucci]

Thank you! Very helpful!!

[@albert93911]

for glass to cast shadows, you'll need to set your Direct light - Light - Advanced - Cast Raytraced Shadows to ON. Otherwise an awesome video, thanks William.

[@owenjenkinsofficial]

Hey this is a good way to get the reflections, but I find that I begin to get normal & lighting artifacts all over my megascans materials once this is active! Is there a fix you know of, then I am down to listen and learn! If not I wonder if this is a conflict with nanite features and the ray tracing settings?

[@Alodecron]

@@owenjenkinsofficial Maybe it is fixed if you, on the light; turn on "Distance field shadows" and on the mesh; set "Generate mesh distance fields" to true?

[@elmoonezazan3144]

it Doesn't work for me

[@owenjenkinsofficial]

​@@Alodecron Looks like I already had distance field shadows turned on the directional light, but I dont see that checkmark option to generate mesh distance fields in the mesh settings. Affect distance field lighting is checked though on the mesh and in the engine rendering settings, then the Generate Mesh Distance Fields is also already checked.

[@sadanandbyahatti]

Turn on Raytraced Shadows in the Project Settings >> Rendering >> Hardware Raytracing to cast shadows from translucent objects.

[@smillerfx]

Thanks William. I've been following your channel and have been learning a lot. I really appreciate that. But it would be really good job if you make a detailed tutorial about displacements (or virtual textures) in UE5. I tried to figure out it but I'm stuck working with displacements or should I import only hi poly geos? I have no idea what is the right way of working with nanite. Thanks man, you're awesome and your channel is brilliant 👍

[@WilliamFaucher]

Hi! Thanks so much! Basically displacement isn't really a thing in UE5. Nanite works best with importing high rez models for the time being. I'm hoping displacement becomes a thing again soon.

[@outtoplay]

@@WilliamFaucher Seems like the launch release has taken what was fairly regular and reliable workflows for many folk and turned them on their ear. I can not remember a software release that seemed more like standing on one leg, while hopping, rubbing one's tummy while you pat your head and count backwards from 1000 in alternating languages of French, Latin and Gaelic. And the fact that light channels and stencil layers are gone just rub salt in the wounds. Perhaps 4.27 isn't as retro after all 😳

[@WilliamFaucher]

@@outtoplay I hear you! It’s not entirely surprising considering the rendering methods are completely new and actively being improved/worked on. X.0 releases are always pretty buggy and that’s kind of expected. Lighting channels never worked with Lumen even in Early Access, due to the way it works/is designed, but if you absolutely need them just disable lumen in the project settings to revert to whatever you had in 4.27 :) It’s a bummer they’re not supported but Lumens benefit still massively outweigh its cons !

[@andreasmoyseos5980]

Thank you William, keep up the great work!

[@WilliamFaucher]

Thank you so much!

[@MrDavilawe]

thanks so much like always!

[@SomeKindOfMattias]

One thing I’ve noticed is that there seems to be something going on with volumetric fog in the release version. If you have a start distance you will see very sharp border where it starts

[@WilliamFaucher]

Just tested it and you're correct. I can't remember if that was also the case in 4.27? I so rarely use start distance at all.

[@SomeKindOfMattias]

@@WilliamFaucher I uninstalled 4.27 so can't double-check, but I'm like 90% sure it worked better in 4.27 and even preview 2. :) Find start distance can be useful to give your immediate vicinity some better sharpness in some cases

[@GordonSeal]

This isn't a problem of the volumetric fog but the exponential height fog in general, the start distance just cuts it off very sharply. It's usually better to avoid the start distance and play with the fogs density instead ... but in general the world fog in Unreal is in dire need of an overhaul.

[@thenoobdev]

Great video! Thanks to take the efforts on explaining all this settings! Though, I've got some issues.. When I change the translucency type to ray tracing, the material has a LOT of noise and dots inside it all the sudden.. What could this be, and how to solve?

[@cr4nkk623]

Great video as usual, thx!

[@solvilla-ln1rb]

Good Work thanks SIr

[@Glowbox3D]

You rock William thanks!

[@lucasfilip4479]

Great tips, thanks a lot! BTW, I noticed the glass is not affected by height fog, is there a workaround?

[@kichmadev]

Love your videos, they are to the point! I'm still struggling to find the best settings for my project, with rayrtracing enabled, it changes my skin shader to be more metallic and gi doesn't look good, and with lumen I get significant noise in reflection when I'm moving the character, since my character is front and center its highly noticable. Is there a specific setting for moving objects that i could look into?

[@Winged4Ever]

11:17 - In order to save some GPU cycles you can place a Sphere Reflection Capture and execute `r.RayTracing.Reflections.ReflectionCaptures 1` to replace black bounced reflections areas with baked reflection.

[@AlekMadeDis]

There is one method "fake it till you make it" but it require some shader wizardly. Basic shader with cubemap for reflection and refractions (more advance is to mask out hot spots in cubmap) and decal for caustics with emissive (if needed). Sure hacky-waky but its works.

[@stefevr]

Thanks for another great video! The nanite fallback needs to be set to 0 to have a better lumen to pathtracing transition, basically using the highest density mesh. For glass I wonder if volumetric shadows works like in UE4? I'll have to check

[@WilliamFaucher]

Yeah set it to 0 but just... be careful. That can easily blow out your vram usage. Nanite meshes are DENSE.

[@stefevr]

@@WilliamFaucher ahhh yeah of course! Im assuming its for pathtracing for linear content in that case even millions of triangles are still okay but megascans can get scary complex! Even without nanite though Unreal seems to do well with crazy meshes surprisingly

[@WilliamFaucher]

@@stefevr thing is even with the pathtracer you can crash when you run outta vram so use with caution! :)

[@stefevr]

@@WilliamFaucher wise words :D

[@smudgybrown67]

Thank you, William =]

[@yanhu]

Very useful video. I wonder why Epic no one talks about it.

[@JoshuaPuppe]

You, sir, are a magnificent human being.

[@unrealist5288]

Very helpful master. 🙂

[@culpritdesign]

I don't make games or do 3d work but I keep watching your videos for some reason.

[@ortizgab]

Hi, William! Thanks for always share your wisdom! I have a RTX3060 with a not so "beefy computer". Which suits me better, Lumen or RTXGI? Always looking for the balance between quality and performance.

[@angellomarques]

Thanx Will!

[@brandonv4289]

Hi Sir! Thank you so much for all your very helpful content. I've learned sooo much from you! My question is: I'm getting this new warning in editor. 256 lights skipped. Active Ray Tracing light count >RAY_TRACING_LIGHT_COUNT_Maximum (256) But everything looks great. Do I need to be concerned or add a higher value somewhere?? Thank you Master Faucher!!

[@paymansalehishafa6884]

One thing I've noticed is that with the glass material, the reflection of reflection comes out as black. The chrome material you showed doesn't use translucency thus we can fix the black reflection of reflections. The only true solution I was able to find was to just use Path Tracing.

[@androssolano]

Hi William, great tutorial! I have a doubt: when i check "ray lighting mode" in lumen reflections inside postprocess volume, the dropdown on the right remains unclickable. Is this because im not working with raytracing? I want to have the highest quality reflections possible without turning on raytracing for performance reasons. Thanks in advance!

[@Suthriel]

Great video, as always :) Haven´t tested it yet, but does subsurface scattering for foliage and leafes ect. still work? Or do they want fix that with UE5.1?

[@SuperMachead1]

Thanks…you helped me with my glass 😎

[@archcast5550]

Brilliant!

[@hdkdesigner]

In the Early Access build of UE5, the value for maximum quality for Lumen Reflections was actually 4, even though the slider only went to 2. Not sure if that is still the case, but setting the value to 4 might improve the quality even more.

[@WilliamFaucher]

I tried, it didn’t seem to have any difference. Seems like it has changed.

[@karpae2k]

Thank you ^^

[@aalmutairi6604]

Thank you

[@hammadwalid8428]

Hi William, great video as always thank you very much for sharing with us. I have a issue with UE5 (EA and Release) lumen, and is that by lighting only with SkyLight + Hdri (not sun), black-non-metallic and metallic-white materials, which have a Roughness 0.3 - 0.7, generate a noise that comes from lighting the Hdri, it's affect reflections and shadows. This cannot be fixed, not even by increasing the samples on PPV, with any method The other lights do not generate noise, only the Skylight + hdri. I would like you to help me please

[@Oskoooei]

so helpful

[@error4597]

This might seem like a really stupid question, but im still really new when it comes to rendering out scenes. Currently using UE4 at the moment for rendering using baked lighting which was already a task getting my head around these past few months. Does lumen produce better results apposed to baking inside of UE5?

[@tann982]

Can you recomend or do you have some sort of tutorial greating height map from world creator and getting it to ue 5. I am trying to create environment but i need also some sort of method (not manual) to add grass, rocks etc to areas similar as mawi has.

[@lz4090]

If Epic has not hired you yet, then I do not know what they are doing. It would be great if you would be helping polish/QC UE5's features that are related to Cinematography, Lighting, etc. Thank you for the informative videos. Hoping most of the problems will be fixed in future updates.

[@EddyKorgo]

Huh. So neither Lumen or Raytraycing is perfect. Been wanting to see the differences. Thanks for showing.

[@WilliamFaucher]

The only way to get things "perfect" is with the Pathtracer! But even that has a few limitations, like no decals, or things like that. But then again, I don't think many offline renderers have decals, that's pretty much a realtime renderer thing.

[@HyraxGames]

I gotta say i am impressed with UE5 I made a awesome looking game on a i3 8100 and gtx1060 6gb I mean, it got some texture issues, but since i am learning Unreal engine i cannot complain all i gotta do is to make small levels and then pack every level to check it out with proper loaded textures

[@BookmansBlues]

@William Faucher : Just some things that happened to me and some people I know. 1) Trying to Install the Bridge Plugin as mentioned here did not work, I got an error, I ended up having to uninstall the Launcher and UE5, and delete the folders left behind, and reinstall everything. 2) One issue that I am having, is that no matter what I do, ray traced reflections, refractions, and the Path Tracer do not work at all, the path tracer which worked with my 1080tis in 4.27 do not seem to work currently in UE5. So I am not sure if support for 10 series GPUs and ray tracing is now not a thing, or if there is something else at work here. Ray traced shadows seem to work fine, but as far as I can tell, nothing else does.

[@dariolc11]

Hi William, thanks a lot for the video! I created some caustics using a decal, but it can´t be visible through the water when I activate the ray tracing on the post-process volume, I think it´s because of the ray traced refraction... Is there any option to make them visible? If I desactivate the ray tracing on the water It just turn into invisible... so it seems that I have to choose between water or caustics, but i just want both of them! Thanks hope you can help me

[@cgkrab]

Wondering if you have any recommendations about smearing? I've noticed 5.1 has some pretty significant smearing. My initial thoughts were AA method and/or motion blur, but swapping TSR or disabling it completely and setting MotionBlur to 0 seem to have no effect. Also no result from writing velocity pass during base pass...so I imagine something else is going on here, perhaps to do with Lumen

[@pedrorivera1892]

EXCELLENT VIDEO! THANK YOU. I'M HAVING A PROBLEM THAT THE GLASS LOKOS KIND OF WHITE INSIDE THE MODEL I'M WORKING ON. I HAVE TRY EVERYTHING ON YOUR VIDEOS ABOUT GLASS AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING WRONG. ANY IDEAS?