SItoA includes Arnold versions of the Softimage Vector State and Vector Scalar shaders, which you can use to do build a “distance between” shading network.

Vector State can get you the origin point of a ray and its intersection point, and Vector Scalar can get the distance between those two points.

You can even use these shaders in Maya (since they are just Arnold shaders). Just put sitoa_shaders somewhere in the ARNOLD_PLUGIN_PATH, and MtoA will load them. The shader UI in the Attribute Editor will be very basic (for example, integer input fields instead of drop-down lists), but you can use the shaders.