Hey everyone

so why does my asset needs to Compile shaders every time I run the game to test?

I can see that the assets in the HDA Sampler project don't do that

So what am I doing wrong? am I missing something?

Thank you

I think it will do that if your underlying material is changing.

I used to be annoyed by all the shader compiling, but now I have just learned to accept it… it's like if there is a constant background noise, you just learn to stop paying attention to it after a while

One trick i found that might help you, is, (and maybe you have already figured this out), but the Epic Games launcher uses an ungodly amount of CPU. (like >30% of my 6 gen i5).

Now, normally, if you try to close the launcher, it will crash Unreal, however, you can go in your Program Files folder and find the UE4editor.exe and run that directly. It will launch the Epic launcher shortly after, but you can close it, no problem. You can probably write a script to close it automatically, if you like to do stuff like that.

This speeds up the “shader compiling” business considerably on my system.

But I don't understand why it has to recompile them every time I PIE (play In Engine)
even if I don't touch the asset at all, just play and stop, then play again and recompiles the shaders, seems illogical.

Something has to be triggering that

Yeah, it's annoying. I wonder, are you using materials from Houdini or are you assigning your materials from in Unreal?

I want to get to the bottom of this problem, too.

twelveplusplus
Yeah, it's annoying. I wonder, are you using materials from Houdini or are you assigning your materials from in Unreal?

I want to get to the bottom of this problem, too.

Using Houdini Materials

the only solution I've found is baking to static mesh but that would be the last step

In the project I'm working on, i have some substance materials that live in Unreal, and i also have some materials that come from houdini. I notice that when i press play, the substance materials pop up immediately whereas the houdini materials take a moment to appear. (persumably because they are being recompiled every time.)

I'm using the unreal_face_material primative attribute to assign the substance textures from my HDA. I guess one thing you could do is you could is bake out your houdini materials and then assign them like that. I guess the only annoying thing is you would lose your ability to adjust the textures in engine (if you were doing that)… plus just the annoying aspect of having to bake out the textures.

that would be better than baking the whole mesh tho, i think.