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[smilesdavis]

Production I.G – Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2002) – Studio 9 & Related Production Tools

Key Technological Milestones

Early Digital Integration – Ghost in the Shell (1995)

Production I.G’s Ghost in the Shell was one of the major early anime productions to combine traditional hand-drawn cel animation with digital compositing and CGI. Computer-generated elements such as the thermo-optical camouflage effects, optical displays and wireframe city imagery were integrated with conventionally animated material as part of an increasingly digital post-production workflow.

The Move to a Fully Digital Pipeline – Blood: The Last Vampire (2000)

Blood: The Last Vampire represented a major transition for Production I.G toward an entirely digital animation pipeline. Physical painted cels were replaced by digital ink-and-paint, with CELSYS RETAS used as one of the central animation-production tools, while compositing and effects work increasingly relied on software such as Adobe After Effects.

Advanced 2D/3D Integration – Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex / Innocence (2002–2004)

With Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Production I.G further refined the integration of 3D CG into predominantly 2D animation. Vehicles, mechanical objects and characters such as the Tachikomas could be constructed and animated in 3D and then composited into hand-drawn scenes.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) pushed this hybrid approach considerably further, combining traditional character animation with elaborate CG environments, complex camera movement and highly detailed digital compositing. Sequences such as the parade are particularly good examples of how far Production I.G’s digital production methods had developed by this point.

RETAS!

RETAS! became one of the standard digital animation-production systems used throughout the Japanese animation industry during this period. Thankfully, a PowerPC Mac version has been preserved on Macintosh Garden:

RETAS!PRO / RETAS! Infinity v5.5 for Mac

This version is particularly interesting for us because it still runs on classic Mac OS / Mac OS 9-era PowerPC hardware.

I have also attached the plug-ins for this version here, since I currently have no idea how to contribute files directly to Macintosh Garden.

For an idea of what the RETAS workflow looked like, here is a video demonstrating a later Mac OS X version:

YouTube – RETAS demonstration

CELSYS later marketed the HD-generation system as RETAS!PRO HD.

For anyone interested in reconstructing an early-2000s Japanese digital animation workstation, RETAS is therefore one of the key pieces of software to preserve and investigate.

[Jubadub]

Thanks for sharing all this, @smilesdavis, fascinating tale.

About making Garden uploads, it's pretty simple, just be logged in and then click on "Edit this page":



Then scroll down a bit to the downloads, and click on the "Add another item" button:



A new field will appear. Click on the "Browse..." button for it, and select your file.

Once that is done, just scroll aaall the way to the bottom of the page and click on the "Save" button.

And that's it!