Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles changed over time – is there any way to lock or preserve previous data?

Cesium for Unreal
1

Hi Cesium team,

We’re using Cesium for Unreal with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles for a cinematic project, and we’ve run into an issue with data consistency over time.

We rendered several shots about two weeks ago. When reopening the same project and camera today (with no changes on our side), the terrain and imagery now look noticeably different — color, texture details, and ground context have changed.

From what we understand:

  • Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles are streamed live

  • The data is not versioned or locked by date

  • When upstream data is updated or reprocessed, older versions are no longer accessible

  • Local cache does not function as true version control

This creates a serious problem for cinematic and long-running productions, where we may need to re-render or fix shots weeks later and expect visual consistency.

Questions:

  1. Is there any supported way (now or planned) to:

    • Lock Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to a specific snapshot/version?

    • Preserve or archive a specific state of the tiles for later reuse?

  2. Are there recommended best practices from Cesium for handling this in cinematic or VFX pipelines?

  3. Is relying on local cache + offline mode the only workaround, or is this not recommended?

We understand the limitations of live-streamed data, but any official guidance or roadmap insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your support.

2

Hi @Kha, welcome to the community!

Unfortunately, our options here are quite limited by Google’s terms of use, which disallow most caching. I suggest you reach out to Google to tell them about your use-case. They could address it either by allowing more options for offline use, or by providing a way to access historical versions of the model via the 3D Tiles API. The good news is, the model in an area doesn’t change very often in my experience. So while it’s extremely painful when it happens in the middle of your production, it _hopefully_ won’t be a huge impediment to use overall.