As Arnold standins…
The Arnold procedural node can load Arnold Scene Source (ASS), Wavefront Obj (OBJ, OBJ.GZ), and Stanford Geometry (PLY), as well as DLLs/SOs.
The swirl is a PLY file I downloaded from http://www.3dvia.com/
eX-SI
ICE, scripting, and other tech stuff about Softimage aka XSI
eX-SI 