Arnold for Maya (MtoA) 5.6.2 is here!

[Stephen.Blair]

We're excited to announce MtoA 5.6.2, built on Arnold 7.5.2.0. This release brings Gaussian Splats to Maya, viewport rendering improvements, and the latest Arnold core features, plus 22 bug fixes for a smoother, more stable experience.

☁️ Flow Render (Tech Preview)

Render in the cloud! Try our new Arnold cloud-rendering service free. Every user gets 2,400 minutes of rendering per month to test it out. This release also adds automatic downloads and new Flow Render preferences. We'd love your feedback.

What's new in MtoA

✨ Gaussian Splats
Bring photoreal 3D Gaussian Splatting scenes into Maya with the new Gaussian Splat node. Load and render splats with full Viewport 2.0 display (bounding box, points, and live 3DGS preview), and use Maya geometry to mask areas of a splat.

🖥️ Viewport rendering improvements
The Arnold Viewport upgrades include faster mesh updates in IPR, z-depth compositing, wireframe sync, an option to display the Maya background, and a handy new menu on the Arnold Viewport button.

⚙️ New device preferences
Set your preferred render device (GPU or CPU) and choose your default GPU device right from user preferences.

🔗 Easier aiNearestPoints setup
A new selection UI makes choosing and connecting meshes to the aiNearestPoints shader much simpler when using node point-cloud mode.

New from Arnold core

🎨 Stylized and non-photorealistic looks

Two new tools for cel-shading and stylized rendering. **Tone Zones** split your lighting into clean brightness bands for that hand-drawn look, while **Shader to RGBA** lets you take full lighting results into your shading tree for creative control.

⚡ Faster performance

• GPU scene updates up to 43% faster for smoother interactive editing
• Production scenes start up to **5x faster** thanks to optimized USD instancing
• PLY meshes load 1.2 to 1.4x faster

🖼️ Sharper denoising

The noice denoiser now preserves fine detail, such as fur, whiskers, and fabric,  without over-blurring, and eliminates stray black-pixel artifacts.

---

📖 Read the full release notes here: MtoA 5.6.2 Release Notes