Materials not showing in Content Drawer or on Mesh

[Robinton13]

I am working on Unreal 5 C++ course lesson 24 of Section 2 (Warehouse). When I drag materials from the starter content onto a mesh the material does not show on the mesh in the editor. The Materials property in the inspector has the correct material listed, but the material does not show up on the mesh in the editor or on the mesh when I run the game.

I also notice that when I drag the material from the content drawer to a mesh, the material stops showing on the icon in the content drawer, see pic:

The material was there before I interacted with the icon, and after dragging the icon becomes the default blank material. I can still see the material if I go to the Material Editor and look at the preview there.

This does not happen to all materials, just some. And I am only using the starter content from Unreal, I haven’t imported anything. I’m also using a Macbook Pro 2021, so I’m sure things are slow, but as far as I can tell the shaders are done compiling. The Unreal Editor isn’t running anything on my CPU at least.

Does anyone know what might be going on? Thanks.

[DanM]

Does it happen on other materials not in the Starter Content?

[Robinton13]

I tried to create a new material and just copy the graph from M_Gold, one of the starter materials that wasn’t working, into the new material. That worked, the new material I made could be applied just fine to the mesh.

I then tried making a small change to M_Gold and resaved it. It recompiled the shader and then M_Gold could also be applied to the mesh.

So two questions. Do you know why some of the starter materials didn’t compile, but others did? And do you think it’s possible this problem could occur again and I’ll have to keep recompiling my materials?

Thanks for the suggestion, I’m glad it’s now working. I just would like to understand where the problem came from in the first place.