Solidangle Maya To Arnold 是一个高端的Maya照明系统，在过去的几年中，Arnold 已被用于创造独特的视觉效果，主要应用于影视级的故事片，动画片，和高端商业项目。

MtoA is a plug-in for Autodesk Maya which provides a bridge to the Arnold rendering system from within the standard Maya interface. Once installed, and the plug-in loaded in Maya, all you need to do is select Arnold rendering in Maya to start rendering your scenes.

One of the most interesting and successfully expanding renderers is Arnold. A fully ray tracing solution, it has gained tremendous credibility in the last few years at the high end especially in major vfx feature films and animated features. Sony Pictures Imageworks was the catalyst for the professional adoption of the product, but its use and reputation have blossomed to places such as Digital Domain, ILM, Luma Pictures, Framestore, Digic Pictures and others.

What's new in 0.2

- Normal Map Support through the native Maya bump2d node. Some extra attributes added to Flip the

different channels.

- Extended the ShadowCatcher shader to support a slot for reflection and shadowColor.

- Improved threading in the Renderview. See RenderView.mp4 and RenderView_IPR.mp4.

- Improved the performance of Override Sets and added a textfield to filter the attributes to override with a

regular expression.

- Increased the number of parameters supported by the Render command. This is a list.

- Ability to define custom path for the AEtemplate of custom shaders with the MTOA_TEMPLATES_PATH

environment variable. It should point to the paths where custom AETemplates are located. MtoA will look for

AETemplates in the MtoA \scripts\mtoa\ui\ae folder and in the ones defined in MTOA_TEMPLATES_PATH.

- Auto-instancing of standins whose "Path" attribute points to an .ass file; subsequent standins trying to load

the same .ass file will instance the previously loaded geometry, potentially saving tons of both memory and

disk I/O.

- UI added to specify trace_sets on shapes.

- Support for custom display drivers.

Arnold was started by Spaniard Marcos Fajardo, but while he lived in the USA. Today Fajardo is still the chief architect of the “Arnold” at Solid Angle and the company is back based in Europe.