Let me preface this with what I want to do.  I just want to create a simple ripple splash from an object dropping into a Maya Ocean, then zooming way out to reveal the large body of water.  I set up an ocean wake via a fluid texture, and synced the ripple’s emission to start right when the object crosses the plane of the ocean. 

When I render individual frames from this in Maya I get a beautiful ripple effect that evolves and settles as it should.  When I go to batch render this scene, however, it turns ugly.  The ripples get very grid-like and produce tons of insanely high-contrast ripple artifacts instead of the nice displaced ripples I see when I render frames within Maya.  The ripples also explode out insanely fast when viewed in sequence in the batch render.  Do I need to cache this in order for it to batch correctly?

If so, how?  I selected the fluidTexture and emitter created when making the wake, as well as the ocean plane and transform (preview plane), selected Fluid nCache, set it for entire timeline, and hit go.  It ran through the frames and finished, but when I played it back, I could not scrub back and forth, and the wake still only worked when starting at frame one, playing back every frame slowly.  There is no sign of any cache node in Maya attached to the fluid texture or anything...I’m just stumped on how to actually do this the right way as there seems to be no step-by-step documentation available for this situation.

Thanks ahead of time for your suggestions!