Way back in the dark ages of 1985, I encountered a guy at the Boston University Graphics lab that was using Makefiles to drive the generation of a 3D renderer for animation. He was a Lisp guy, doing early procedural generation and 3D actor systems. His Makefile was extremely elegant, about 10 lines total. It generated hundreds of animations, all based on the simple file date dependency. He had Lisp generating the 3d form for each frame, and them Make would generate the frames. This being '85, pre pretty much everything we take for granted with 3D and animation, the guy was blowing everyone's mind. He went on to write the 3D renderer for Iron Giant, and was key in Caroline too, I seem to remember. Brian Gardner.