The particles in my scene are not Batch Rendering properly and I've done quite a bit of troubleshooting so far (but have not figured out what's wrong). Here's where I'm at:

I've got about 5000 particles in a scene. When I render a single frame from within Maya, everything looks great. When I Batch Render, the particles only show up in about 6 or 7 of 5000 frames! In the frames where they appear, they look correct.

What could be causing this?

My particle disk cache is good, because I can scrub back and forth in the timeline and the particles all behave themselves. I've rebuilt the particle cache several times, just in case, and am no closer to a solution.

I can tell that the correct camera is being used because both the camera and the emitter object are on motion paths and everything is tracking properly.

The particles are "cloud" type and everything I've seen indicates that they are to be s/w-rendered, which is what I'm doing.

I am especially confused because the particles show up correctly in those few frames (scattered randomly throughout the animation sequence) but are missing in all of the rest of the frames...


Please Help!