Praise for an impressively flexible design, any inspiration?

[DanInProgress]

I wanted to start off by saying how cool this software is, and thank you to all contributors for the hard work!

I am relatively new to VFX tools and workflows, but, as a computer programmer, I was impressed by the emergent flexibility and strength created by the python-based desc.Node API. Handling a great deal of boilerplate for Node implementers (dependency generation, invalidation, file naming) made it very easy to add my own tools to the pipeline.

• Anyone know if the user interface or API were inspired/influenced by other common industry tools?
• Has anyone made use of meshroom for non-reconstruction workflows? For example:
  • VFX rendering multi-step pipelines (e.g. model(blender)->animate(houdini)->render(cycles)->composite(davinci))
  • computer vision/data science training workflows (e.g. import/clean a data set->split training/test data->train->inference/evaluate)

From my work, I know there are other tools for the latter, but I found the ease of local setup and extension made it very powerful for prototyping. (and eventually scalable using submitters with addl code)

Anywho, Thanks for an awesome tool, and I hope all is well with the Alicevision team and all contributors.