Collection "Render Visibility," should be animatable
Render visibility is already animatable per object, but if you try to press "i" to keyframe a collection's visibility, a message pops up saying that "hide_render property cannot be animated."
I would really like if this were possible, as I often work with large machine assemblies made of many parts and need to hide them all at once.
5 Comments
If you can’t animate, then why is this property needed at all for collections? In fact, it also turns out to be a cumbersome design. You can get by with just one checkbox and its property cannot be animated. It turns out now that the function is like a piece of code, but it is unfinished, supposedly with a hint that we will finish it later. When there are 6k+ objects in a scene with 40+ collections and some kind of automation, the absence of this function is perplexing, what do you mean they didn’t do it? Why? Has the option of animating the collection on the timeline been considered? Ok, what if I need to hide 20-30 times on the timeline and show 1-2k objects in collections? It becomes an exciting adventure for many hours. And if you add to everything else that there are steps on the timeline with explanations on markers, you can easily throw in a day of work
A long time ago, Blender layers (part of what collections are meant to match/extend) were able to have their toggles animated. That proved to be unwieldy and the feature was eventually removed, so I'm not sure we're likely to see it re-instituted at this point.
* @Jason van Gumster * It would still be nice to have some way to quickly animate the visibility of objects in the collection then; maybe a way to keyframe all visibility at once. Perhaps when hitting the "i" key while in the outliner, there is an option for viewport and render visibility? That way you could RMB + Collection > Select Objects > "i" > insert render visibility keyframe > RMB + Collection > toggle visibility > "i" > insert render visibility keyframe.
Currently the only time efficient method of hiding a large group of objects is by parenting them to an empty, and scaling it to 0. This provides it's own issues like the fact that objects with a scale of 0 still need to be loaded onto the GPU for rendering, and have the BVH built for them.
* @Zach Hixson * The faster way would be to make an instance of your collection and hide/unhide that instance as needed.
* @Jason van Gumster * Oh cool! Since animating collection visibility didn't work I didn't think an instanced collection would work either, but that solves my problems, thanks