Canterville is an immersive adaptation of The Canterville Ghost for Atelier Daruma’s Large Field Theater. Visitors wearing standalone headsets move through a shared virtual space, entering the sets of an animated film rather than simply exploring a simulated manor.

Everything had to run inside the headset. Each environment was designed as a separate volume, hidden from outside and revealed when visitors crossed its threshold. Shaders using inverted normals or distance masks made this transition possible, turning a performance constraint into part of the experience.

The visual approach followed the same logic: low-poly geometry, hand-painted textures and emissive surfaces instead of calculated lighting. Darkness helped keep large spaces manageable while a few light sources guided the eye.

I developed six environments from the art direction team’s concepts, covering modelling, layout, shaders and initial textures. I tested them in a headset from the first iterations, adjusting proportions and scale that looked convincing on screen but felt wrong in VR. These demos supported internal reviews and client presentations.

I also wrote Blender add-ons to help the team with unfamiliar workflows, including a baking script to preserve the painted shaders when transferring assets to Unity, and carried out integration tests. The six environments reached look development and were validated in VR, with intermediate renders used for progress reviews with the project’s funders.