Autodesk has released Arnold for Maya (MtoA) 5.6.4, which lets artists assign any Arnold shader to a Gaussian splat.
Arnold 7.5.2 added 3DGS rendering and relighting in June through a dedicated gaussian_splat_shader, whose emission component reproduces the captured colors and whose diffuse component enables path traced relighting. MtoA 5.6.4, built on Arnold 7.5.4.0, opens the aiGaussianSplat node to the rest of the shading library, and Autodesk gives aiStandardSurface and a toon shader as examples.
An aiGaussianSplat with no shader assigned falls back to the built-in Gaussian splat shader, so existing scenes render as they did before.
Autodesk lists the splat change among the MtoA additions. The announcement does not say whether HtoA, MAXtoA or the other Arnold plugins gain the same shader assignment. Elsewhere in Maya, V-Ray 7.4 added Gaussian splat relighting in July.
The Arnold Viewport now keeps Maya's cached playback on, which speeds up playback of animated characters. The viewport render shows motion blur, the Accelerated Viewport is faster in scenes with many instances or curves, and accelerated rendering now also works in the Arnold RenderView. Multipart EXRs can give each AOV its own compression, such as DWAB on utility passes and lossless ZIP on the beauty.
Three additions come from Arnold core. The new aiImagerShader runs a shading network on the rendered image, reading AOVs through OSL or aiImage nodes, and editing it during IPR does not restart the render. aiRimLight splits the rim lighting out of aiToon into a standalone node in a new Stylized group in Hypershade. Frame Time Limit stops a batch render after a set time and saves a complete, if noisier, image. The Flow Render cloud service, still a Tech Preview, adds custom OCIO configs, UDIM tile tokens and a per-frame render time limit.
MtoA 5.6.4 is available now with 40 bug fixes.
