How rain works in Starfield (and lots of other games)

polygon.com:

Starfield players realized this week that their characters have rainclouds that follow them around planets, à la The Truman Show. Rain isn’t falling all over Neon, for instance — just wherever you roam. A Starfield player posted a photo using Starfield’s photo mode to Reddit, showing the block of rain around their character, and nowhere else.

It may have been surprising for players, but the rain trick is not unique to Starfield — it’s used in most games, according to game developers. Thomas Francis, lead visual effects artist at Darkest Dungeon studio Red Hook, told Polygon that it’s a common practice in games to attach rain visual effects to the game’s camera to optimize for performance “by not rendering every rain drop, only what is important in front of the camera.”

“The technique can also be used for snow, wind, leaves falling, dust,” he added via email. “All sorts of environmental visual effects.”

That’s what you’re seeing in this screenshot, except that the grid or block of rain appears to be attached to the character and not the camera. (For transparency, two Polygon staffers were unable to reproduce the effect; our rain turned off when we entered Starfield’s photo mode.) You can see this clearly when the camera moves back but the character you’re playing as stays in place. Karl Schecht, a 3D environment artist and the guy who reloads household items like they’re video game guns, told Polygon that video games have some “clever trickery” that’s been standard for quite a while.

“Even if what’s on screen looks real, more often than not things are quite a bit different under the hood,” Schecht said in an email. “You see, everything in a videogame, whether it’s lighting, reflections, weather stuff, and scenery are all