DazToMaya 1.1 plugin, with auto-conversion of materials for Arnold/Vray in “Maya 2016 or higher”.
I imagine most DAZ Studio photoreal users will be happy sticking with the quality of their iRay / Reality renders. But for a modest $30 the new plugin may interest small-studio Maya users, people who need to more quickly import DAZ’s royalty-free content while doing work for clients.
Of course there’s also the possibility of tooning a DAZ scene in Maya. I’ve never really looked at Maya’s toon capabilities before, but I had a look just now. It appears the default toon effect is certainly not up to Cinema 4D standards. I searched in vain for a screenshot example of a Maya toon render that wouldn’t cause derisive snorts of laughter among readers/buyers of graphic-novels. But all the likely examples I lit upon turned out to be done in Unity or Unreal Engine, or Blender, or were highly customised Vray. Or they obviously took an enormous amount of time and fiddling to set up. But if you want to check it out, I read that Maya’s basic toon rendering engine is to be found at: Maya | Surface | Ramp Shader, and judging by the documentation it’s fairly tweak-able.
But it’s obviously nowhere near as good as the ink and toon effects in Cinema 4D, and remember that Poser Pro 11 to Cinema 4D is really easy to do via Smith Micro’s plugin.
Admittedly Arnold may get a good toon render option soon, though that’s not yet available. Possibly there are others for Arnold that I don’t known about. And Vray also appears to have basic toon shaders and can be tweaked. So there may also be options to explore there.
But for making still renders for comic-book frames etc it still looks best to load the DAZ character or prop into a $60 copy of Poser 11 (or export as .OBJ, if a Library load can’t be done). Then in Poser set up a flat IBL light and turn on the real-time Comic Book Mode. Thus getting a superior and quicker effect. Even more so, if you’re willing to swop out grungy 3D textures for something more toon-friendly.