An interesting new piece of freely available software allows you to load point clouds from Pixar’s Renderman into Maya for visualization. You can download the source & binaries from their website.
Randall Hand
Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.