Physical Materials in Maya

The Maya plug-in uses the physical material pipeline to define materials and shaders for Beast. This has the following implications:

All Maya materials are internally converted to OSL using the beastphong.osl shader. This may not model all Maya materials precisely, so you should expect some slight differences.
A new shading node has been added, named BeastOSL. You can use this new node to supply your own OSL shader. It is highly recommended to make use of this new node wherever possible, instead of relying on standard Maya materials.
The Beast OSL shaders are live-linked, which means that you can tweak the shaders and their parameters while rendering. Standard Maya materials are not live-linked.
Like all rendering done for physical materials in Beast, any settings that you provide in the XML configuration file under GISettings or AASettings are not honored. The only way to configure global illumination is using the parameters exposed in the Beast settings in the Attribute Editor in Maya. Anti-aliasing settings are rolled into the quality settings. Note, however, that if you want to customize the edge dilation and bilinear filtering for texture baking, you still have to do it through the XML file.
GI caches, such as the final gather cache and path tracer cache, are no longer used. Beast relies instead on per-pixel path tracing. A new post-filter step has been introduced to minimize the noise that can be produced with this approach. You can configure the settings for this filter for each Beast target. Note that this filtering is only applied to targets that contain illumination only.