threejs-weather

Anchor a small, deep particle volume in front of the camera and rotate it to face the camera direction, with frustumCulled set to false. A world-sized box of particles puts almost every drop outside the narrow cone a long lens sees.

Reuse the rain pool and push every dial: draw 100% of drops instead of 60%, increase fall speed, and scale slant with velocity squared so it reads as wind. Thinning density with setDrawRange means a storm costs no more memory than drizzle.

Float32BufferAttribute copies the array you pass it, so writing to your original array never reaches the GPU. Keep a reference to attr.array and update that instead, with DynamicDrawUsage set on the attribute.

Track settled snow as a separate variable on a slow timer, rising while snow falls and melting back when weather changes. For shader-mixed surfaces like instanced grass, add a dedicated uniform since material color cannot reach colors mixed inside the shader.

Delay the thunder sound by distance, roughly 0.32 seconds for near strikes up to about 3 seconds for far ones, and lower the gain the longer the delay. This single correlation is what makes a strike feel far away.

Relighting the scene every frame while blizzard strength and snow depth drift continuously is expensive. Gate the relight behind a threshold check on the slow values so it fires a few times a second instead of sixty.