The easiest way would be to output plain particles, and use Maya's Sprite Wizard to setup the sprites. The wizard mainly sets up a material for the particles, and a few expressions. The asset can also output a few point attributes to control the sprites, such as:
spriteNumPP
spriteScaleXPP
spriteScaleYPP
spriteTwistPP
See:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Maya/files/GUID-172AE4F0-5D6D-4138-BE81-FBC0BF146909-htm.html [
knowledge.autodesk.com]
I've attached a simple scene that uses a Houdini asset to control the sprites.
If the sprite only has one frame, then the Sprite Wizard is straight forward to use. However, if the sprite is an image sequence, the dialog has more options. I've attached screenshots of the options that were used to create the attached scene.
In my tests, mental ray and Arnold seem to have issues rendering the sprites with that use per-particle offsets. All the sprites would incorrectly use the same frame in the image sequence. This seem to happen with sprites that are created with regular Maya particles. So I suspect it's issues in Maya or the renderers.