Maya 2016, Window's 7
Ok I have a scene with a number of paint effects of animated fire in it so converting to mesh isn't an option because that looks terrible. I have the scene set up in 2 render layers one the main scene master layer and the other a direct copy where everything except the paint effects have been retextured with a "Use Background" material. Every time I render a single frame with Maya Software I get exactly what I want, the paint effects render with certain parts cut off that are behind the "Use Background" material. I do have the "render strokes" option checked and the batch is set to render with Maya Software. But for some reason when I preform batch renders of the paint effects layer all I get are purely transparent frames.
I wasn't sure if maybe paint effects and the use background were the problem but I made a scene with a sphere and paint effects flames, attached the use background material to the sphere and was still able to get a batch render to work exactly as it should. I also exported the entire project (and portions of it) several different ways (Mb, Ma, and even FBX) but that doesn't seem to work either. In the FBX export I had to re-make all the paint effects from scratch and it still didn't work but then had an interesting render result where even though the rest of the objects in the scene had the "use background" material on them, and were responding as such in the editor when batch rendering the frames came out without any paint effects (STILL!) but then even the use background didn't seem to work because all of the mesh was more or less flat white.
No clue what's going on here, really wracking my brain trying to figure this one out. Please help!
