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m_schmid
m_schmid
Known Participant
May 18, 2026

Flickering shadows with Advanced 3D Renderer (AE 26.2.1)

  • May 18, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 85 views

It seems to be impossible to have stable shadows from a spot light with the Advanced 3D Renderer, the darkness just changes randomly on every frame. I’ve tried a lot of different settings and this issue seems impossible to solve.

Higher Render Quality > Fails
ELS Resolution Double > Fails
Higher ELS Smoothness > Fails
Bigger Casting Box Size > Fails
Mercury GPU Acceleration (CUDA) > Fails
Mercury Software Only > Fails
Media Cache On/Off > Fails

There are no overlapping layers either. Most recent GPU driver is installed. This occured on multiple projects in different AEPs.

      3 replies

      m_schmid
      m_schmidAuthor
      Known Participant
      May 19, 2026

      Hi ​@Nishu Kushwaha and ​@David.Arbor,

      thanks for your quick reply. I have attached a small project file with a similar setup as in the project I’ve encountered this issue. And of course a render output with these flickering shadows. The flickering of the shadows is always different every time I render it.

      ​@David.Arbor I have tried to turn off adaptive resolution and to render with higher render quality, both didn’t help.

      ​@Nishu Kushwaha These are my system specs:
      CPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X
      GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
      GPU Driver: 581.57 (Studio)
      RAM: 64 GB DDR4-2667
      OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit (Build 19054)

      David.Arbor
      Community Manager
      David.ArborCommunity Manager
      Community Manager
      May 19, 2026

      Thank you so much for sending both the screen recording and project. Unfortunately, this looks like an issue we’ve been trying to chase down for some time. It’s not easy to reproduce because it looks like there might be a race condition—when two processes try to use or change the same resource at the same time, which can cause unpredictable results.

      Can you try reordering your shadow catcher layer to see if it helps? Putting it above the shapes and/or above the camera or light are basically the only places it can go. But it’s worth a shot in case the interference can be avoided by changing when that layer gets rendered in the stack.

      -David, After Effects Engineering Team

      m_schmid
      m_schmidAuthor
      Known Participant
      May 20, 2026

      Reordering the layers did not help, but it changes the behavior of the flickering for sure. Having the camera as first layer gave me the worst result.

      Rendering a second or third image sequences with a different order of layers to replace the broken frames needs to be the workaround for now i guess.

      David.Arbor
      Community Manager
      David.ArborCommunity Manager
      Community Manager
      May 18, 2026

      Hi ​@m_schmid ,

       

      Sorry about this. As Nishu said, could you please share a screen recording? Different types of flickering indicate different issues, so it will be helpful to see exactly what you’re seeing.

      Also, do you have Adaptive Resolution turned on? If so, after you capture a screen recording, could you try turning it off to see if the issues goes away?

      Edit: One other question, does changing the Render Engine quality from the “Renderer Options...” dropdown menu in the Comp panel toolbar affect the shadows while the problem is occurring? 

       

      -David, After Effects Engineering Team

      Nishu Kushwaha
      Community Manager
      Nishu KushwahaCommunity Manager
      Community Manager
      May 18, 2026

      That's not ideal. Sorry to hear about the issue.

      What are your system specifications (CPU, GPU, RAM, OS version)? Do you mind sharing a screen recording of the issue? Also, please share the project file with us so that we can replicate the issue on our end. Feel free to share them via DM if you prefer not to share them publicly.

      Looking forward to your response.


      Thanks,

      Nishu

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