My pet distraction recently has been writing a Maya plugin called Mayaseed. Right now its a fairly simple translater to convert maya scenes into .appleseed scenes that the Appleseed renderer can play with. Appleseed is an open source renderer written by a good friend François Beaune and a brand new Alpha version should be available to download today with my exporter bundled in with it. Heres a little image made using the first, of many, versions of Mayaseed.
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