Jittery tiles in all rendering modes except Cinematic

Hey folks, we have a persistent (yet intermittent) problem where map tiles from Google Maps 3D Tiles API seem to “jitter” or “wiggle” from frame to frame during renders. It appears that parts of the frames are updated at the incorrect time, so the output frames are sort of a “concatenation” of frames at different times.

It appears to be explicitly a problem during renders. “Game play” looks stable in the preview-in-editor, but PNGs or JPGs rendered with the Movie Render Queue show this really bad jitter in any setting other than Cinematic. It goes away when I render with Cinematic quality, but the render times become unacceptably long for us. I’ve tried all kinds of texture streaming and pool size options with no apparent effect.

See an example video here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tFSZ8CENXzLCRPP2ijJs7PPtS_b-Wwyk/view?usp=sharing

This has happened on UE 5.1 and 5.2.1. Currently we’re using UE 5.2.1 and Cesium for Unreal 1.29.0. I’m running it on a 2023 MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip and 16 GB of RAM. I’m rendering pretty high-resolution frames, at 3728 x 2208, with a Max Screen Space Error of 4.0.

Any help would be appreciated!

I’m not able to access your video:
image

How about this link? Thanks for taking a look!

Ok, I can see the flicker. It looks like depth fighting, but I’m not sure. One thing that jumps out at me, though, is that you’re rendering a movie but you’re getting a very low quality mesh. Especially if you’re setting the Max SSE to 4.0, as you’ve said. Cesium for Unreal will wait for all required tiles to load before snapping a frame, so I’m not sure why this happening. One possible explanation is that your Level Sequence is not inside your level (it’s just an asset), which will defeat this “wait for all tiles” behavior.

So I think you should try to get that working. And if it is depth fighting, it’s possible that it’s caused by the low quality meshes being viewed up close, and it will go away once the LOD is correct.