Maya 2019 + Vray 4.30.01 always rendering masterlayer when batch rendering?

[yolov]

Wow, OK. That's very useful info, thank you for sharing.

[Morbid Angel]

I had big issues using render setup in production. It did not record overrides on referenced scenes correctly and messed them upon reloading the scene, this was in 2018 maya though. I don't think its a reliable system yet.

[waaazoo]

Ok, I had some down time between shots and got to the bottom of it. Its not a Vray issue at all, but since RenderSetup by default hides render layer info in the outliner it makes it hard to see whats going on behind the scenes if youre trying to find rogue layers. There's an option in RenderSetup preferences to enable all RenderSetup data to show in outliner. (I can see why they hide it by default) But I dug around and found some names of layers that had been renamed. These old layers, rather than being renamed and being fine, seemed to hang around as a non visible layer in render setup, but renderable when submitted....but also not as the old name, but called "masterLayer".

Weird, but at least its not the references or anything with the scene. Just need to be very weary of renaming RenderSetup layers and making sure you check how its all looking in the outliner.

Maya is very good at keeping things we don't want and we don't even know unless you dig into the hidden stuff on outliner. I can remember a scene starting to be slow. After looking closely into this I found sets from an old character, not from the scene, not even from the project. It must have been loaded by any prop or so I imported. And there were hundreds (maybe thousand) of these sets hanging around. You are supposed to be able to clean-up the scene with optimize scene size, but sometimes it just doesn't.
It's good to know about these render layers. I'll be careful with that.