Programming can be a lot of fun when software shows some serious flaws in certain areas and you are able to improve on that. Building better tools in communication with the community has been a fantastic experience.

Driven by the desire for beauty and power combined with ease of use, AoN:Studio was the first commercial collection of procedural shaders for messiah:studio back in the day. It enhances the possibilities of this package quite a bit and is a real "must have" IMO if you are serious about rendering in messiah. (well, I'm biased ;-) )

AoN:XSI is basically a port of the same shaders to Autodesk Softimage, which also lacks decent procedruals by default, but with some new functionality and adapted to the quite different shadertree in XSI.
Originally, these shaders were only used for inhouse projects, but now I am making them available to the public, bit by bit.

In the Tools-Area you can find some simple and free plugins and helpers for messiah:studio and XSI/Mental Ray