I am nearing completion of a small suite of plugins for a commercial client – what an adventure that’s been! I was writing Lightwave plugins to translate STL object model format into Lightwave model format, while preserving the materials attributes (raw STL doesn’t support materials). Then I had to write a new shader to render them that took into account the surface smoothing errors that the STL models tend to have in them (because of the strange tesselation choices the exporting software that creates STL files tend to make). I got it all working, finally. But boy was that stuff hard. I decided I’d never do another Lightwave plugin after that.