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How rain works in Starfield (and lots of other games)
26.09.2023 - 20:13 / polygon.com / David Szymanski
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 part of a built system. They’re set up to look and feel real, but also to run smoothly on your console or PC. Let’s take the rain in Starfield as an example. Whether you’re in first or third person, the rain looks solid. But switch to photo mode, zoom out, and you’ll see the rain is actually a small particle system, about 3x3 meters, that hangs out above your character.”
David Szymanski, who created Iron Lung, broke down the particle system: “Basically rain is usually done with some sort of particle system, which is just a way of making a lot of similar things that all move or animate,” Szymanski wrote. “Particle systems are great at rendering a lot of things at once very cheaply, but it would still require a not insignificant amount of processing power to have hundreds of thousands of raindrops (or more) visible onscreen, especially if they’re also transparent in any way.”
Developers can size down the particle system to have as few raindrops as possible, tied to either the player or
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