Bizarre Material Mishap

Huehueteotl

Running UDK
I deleted a large group of meshes because they were duplicates with the wrong naming conventions for my project, and almost immediately after that all of my materials stopped working. I had imported my meshes from 3ds max with their textures embedded in the FBX. I think this is relevant but I have no idea. Now the program repeatedly crashes when I try to save. When I open it up again, my materials appear to have returned, but as soon as I open one of them in the material editor, or place a mesh into a level, the materials disappear. This happens with material which include textures and those that do not.
I have considered reinstalling but I want to check the forum first in case someone else has had this problem. They were pretty specific circumstances though. I’ve restarted the program so many times since it happened that I don’t have the log from when it happened to me.

I am using udk 2011-2012
OS Windows 7 64 bit
i7 processor 8gb ram

blankslatejoe

When you reopen, I believe what you are seeing when you load up the packages are just the cached thumbnail of the materials, not the materials itself--it doesn't load that till you open the material editor or the mesh. anyway, it sounds like somehow your new meshes were referencing the textures from the fbx files you thought were legacy, or something like that.

In general, deleting stuff in Unreal is a bit delicate. Unreal has a lot of invisible re directors/pointers/references, especially if you rename/move assets a lot... and Unreal usually has graceful ways of at least NOT crashing if those redirectors end up getting busted....but it sounds like you stumbled off some new form of the redirector-hell-cliff.

Do you get ANY warnings/errors when you load the editor/your mapfiles up?

You could try and import your FBX files again, giving them the same name as the ones you like (not just "reimporting", mind you). That will prompt the import options, during which you can fiddle with the material import settings..and it might cull out any bad references. You'll probably be better off handbuilding the materials from scratch, and manually importing the textures, to clean up this situation.

unfortunately though, if you just reinstall and just try and copy over your project's maps/packages, you may end up with the same issues again.

But yeah, UDK+invisible referencing= sad. Sorry dude.

Huehueteotl

thanks for responding.

i tried importing my fbxes again, although i haven't tried re-naming them in the fresh import. theres another thing which i forgot to mention, when i open one of my materials in the material editor, it won't even preview. i don't know whats up with that.
i also don't see any errors in my log, although they might be there and hiding from me.

blankslatejoe

...That's probably not so good.
Here's something to try maybe:
--Take all your custom upks and .umaps and move them, temporarily, out of the UDK directory. Then see if you can load UDK up and open any stock unreal/example stuff. If that doesn't work, then delete your config/UDK*.ini files (and/or reinstall UDK). If that part DOES work, then you could manually add the packages, a couple at a time, again and see what happens. That will at least tell you which collection of assets is the problem.

Either way, you're in for unpleasantness.

You could also post this over on the epic/UDK forums and see if anyone there's run into the situation before. You'll want to be sure to stress that you had the importer autoimport/build the materials from the embedded textures(that sounds like what you did, right?)... since that's relatively a new feature and seems like it's probably where things started to go wrong, once you deleted the old assets.
goodluck