Arnold for Maya (or MtoA) provides a bridge to the Arnold renderer from within Maya's standard 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.