Arnold for Maya (or MtoA) provides a bridge to the Arnold renderer from within the standard Maya interface.
Features
Seamless integration with Maya shapes, cameras, lights and shaders.
Image Based Lighting support, including a state of the art physical sky.
Interactive rendering (IPR) allows parameter changes to be rapidly previewed without interrupting your work.
Support for volume rendering with Maya Fluids.
Support for Maya Hair and nHair.
Particles and nParticles support, including particle instancer.
Defer the creation of geometry at render time with the Stand-in placeholder nodes.
Productivity boost: override sets, holdout mattes, shadow catcher, passes, UDIM style textures, and arbitrary primvar data.
Extensible through plug-ins (Golaem, FumeFX for Maya, Yeti, Shave & Haircut).
XGen integration.
Texturable geometric lights.
Deep EXR.
Rendering of curves.
HIGHLIGHTED NEW FEATURES
Reduced OpenVDB memory usage: In the OpenVDB DSO provided, voxel storage is now optimized to reduce memory usage by about 45%. Depending on the scene this may also reduce render time up to 10%. Additionally, slow .vdb file loading from network drives on Windows has been fixed, and we have improved the accounting of OpenVDB memory usage in the stats.
Autobump on polymeshes: The autobump feature in displacement shader is now supported on polymeshes with no subdivision. Previously it required subdivision to work.
Faster subdivision: Faster exact (limit) normals and tangents, in certain cases, "Smooth Tangents" speedups up to 50%, smoothing speedups up to 25%.
Faster AiVCellNoise3/4: The vector cell noise API functions AiVCellNoise3() and AiVCellNoise4(), which are used in e.g. MayaNoise type "billow", are now about 1.6x faster.
EXR long names: Attribute and channel names up to 255 chars are now supported in EXR files. Arnold will warn if long names are used since the output files are not compatible with reader applications that use EXR libraries older than 1.7.0.
Features
Seamless integration with Maya shapes, cameras, lights and shaders.
Image Based Lighting support, including a state of the art physical sky.
Interactive rendering (IPR) allows parameter changes to be rapidly previewed without interrupting your work.
Support for volume rendering with Maya Fluids.
Support for Maya Hair and nHair.
Particles and nParticles support, including particle instancer.
Defer the creation of geometry at render time with the Stand-in placeholder nodes.
Productivity boost: override sets, holdout mattes, shadow catcher, passes, UDIM style textures, and arbitrary primvar data.
Extensible through plug-ins (Golaem, FumeFX for Maya, Yeti, Shave & Haircut).
XGen integration.
Texturable geometric lights.
Deep EXR.
Rendering of curves.
HIGHLIGHTED NEW FEATURES
Reduced OpenVDB memory usage: In the OpenVDB DSO provided, voxel storage is now optimized to reduce memory usage by about 45%. Depending on the scene this may also reduce render time up to 10%. Additionally, slow .vdb file loading from network drives on Windows has been fixed, and we have improved the accounting of OpenVDB memory usage in the stats.
Autobump on polymeshes: The autobump feature in displacement shader is now supported on polymeshes with no subdivision. Previously it required subdivision to work.
Faster subdivision: Faster exact (limit) normals and tangents, in certain cases, "Smooth Tangents" speedups up to 50%, smoothing speedups up to 25%.
Faster AiVCellNoise3/4: The vector cell noise API functions AiVCellNoise3() and AiVCellNoise4(), which are used in e.g. MayaNoise type "billow", are now about 1.6x faster.
EXR long names: Attribute and channel names up to 255 chars are now supported in EXR files. Arnold will warn if long names are used since the output files are not compatible with reader applications that use EXR libraries older than 1.7.0.
