Arnold for Maya 5.5.4

Arnold for Maya (MtoA) 5.5.4 for Maya 2026.3 includes a new Inference imager, performance improvements in Global Light Sampling and in GPU volumes, and other enhancements and bug fixes.

See the Arnold for Maya release notes for the full list of recently added features and bug fixes.

Faster rendering with Global Light Sampling

Scenes using Global Light Sampling, render up to 2.5x faster in our tests. The numbers below are for same-noise renders. (ARNOLD-13091)

Improved Global Light Sampling (GLS) on glossy material in GPU renders

GPU renders (like CPU renders since Arnold 7.3.7.0 now take material glossiness into account when sampling, which greatly enhances the quality especially when many small lights are present. In the robot scene below, we get a ~3x speedup with adaptive rendering. (ARNOLD-15833)

7.4.2, fixed AA 7.4.3, fixed AA, GLS glossy enabled

Faster volume rendering on GPU

Scenes with volumes render up to 3.3x faster. Scenes with OpenPBR materials render up to 1.2x faster. (ARNOLD-11077, ARNOLD-16304)

Instanced spheres - 1.18x faster Byc cloud - 3.3x faster Sunset clouds - 1.76x faster

Inference Imager

The >Inference imager is capable of performing inference on image-to-image machine learning models using the ONNX framework. (ARNOLD-16071)

Improved thin-walled subsurface in OpenPBR

When an instancer contains lights, it now takes their local matrix into account if instance_inherit_xform is enabled. The OpenPBR subsurface lobe in the thin-walled mode uses subsurface_weight to blend between diffuse and subsurface lobes while maintaining energy conservation. You can use this, for example, to model diffuse transmission and reflection in paper. (ARNOLD-15982)
Previous behavior
7.4.3

Energy conserving metal in OpenPBR

The OpenPBR metal lobe now conserves energy and passes the furnace test. (ARNOLD-16327)
Previous behavior
7.4.3

Improved HTML reports

The Arnold Render Report now supports sorting of statistics, displays the stats of the final render only, and has improved styles for resizing charts and tables. (ARNOLD-15600, ARNOLD-16011, ARNOLD-16562)

Renders automatically create output directories

Any time you render (for example, with kick or a DCC command-line process), the Arnold output drivers will automatically create any output folders that do not already exist. (ARNOLD-3476)

Imager Optimizations

Imager framebuffer management has been improved to reduce overhead between imager chains. This is especially noticeable when handling many imager chains. For example, in a 4096 x 2160 resolution render, we see the overhead between imager execution reduced by 4x when compared to Arnold 7.4.2.2, saving about 1 second per imager chain. (ARNOLD-16261, ARNOLD-16264, ARNOLD-16281)

Improved interactivity

Interactive render performance is improved, especially for camera moves and lighting changes. (ARNOLD-16200)

CPU fallback when no supported GPU found

Arnold falls back to CPU rendering according to the value of the render_device_fallback option when there are no supported GPUs. (ARNOLD-16277)

Improvements in geometry stats

Memory usage for top-level objects is now correctly calculated, and a new entry was added in memory stats. (ARNOLD-16350)

One-to-one path mapping rules

The Arnold pathmap file now supports one-to-one mapping rules, which offers a simple method to replace exact path references. The rules are defined within the path_map section of the JSON file. (ARNOLD-16351) 
{
    "path_map": {
        "linux": {
            "S:/textures/plastic_basecolor.exr": "plastic_basecolor.exr",
            "S:/textures/plywood_normal.exr": "/mnt/plywood_textures/01/normal.exr"
        }
    }
}

Override output directory in kick

The kick command has a new argument-od that specifies an output directory path. This output directory is created if necessary, and added as a prefix to the output filenames specified by drivers in the scene. (ARNOLD-16513)

Light visibility in procedurals

You can now disable all lights in a procedural by setting the procedural visibility to 0. Any non-zero visibility enables the lights. This is evaluated per-instance, so you can disable lights for some procedural instances and enable them for others. (ARNOLD-16206)

OpenColorIO Aliases

You can now use OCIO aliases such as srgb_texture as input color spaces. The builtin OCIO config also supports the srgb_texture alias as well as other tweaks to be compatible with Maya 2026.2. (ARNOLD-16465, ARNOLD-16467)

MaterialX 1.39.3

The MaterialX version is now 1.39.3, upgraded from 1.38.10. Consult the full MaterialX release notes for more details. (ARNOLD-16361)

USD Enhancements

API changes

Incompatible changes

Bug Fixes

System Requirements

Parent topic: What's New in Maya 2026.2 Update