allow access to contents of disabled collections.
Often you want to exclude a collection from the viewlayer, for example if you have a load of objects that are being used for instancing.
The thing is, it's not uncommon to need to modify properties or materials used by those now hidden objects, so the collection's 'hide in viewlayer' box needs to be unticked again so they're selectable.
I propose that the contents of a disabled collection still be selectable so their object properties, modifiers, materials etc can still be edited without making the collection contents appear in the render again.
6 Comments
It's not uncommon that I find blender to restrict procedures in unfriendly ways, but this is not one of them. If you want to edit those objects, it is literally one check box that you have to click in order to be able to do so. I don't believe we need another way of filtering it so that this simple checkbox click is not required; it has the potential downside of being yet another layer of management that the user has to deal with when they don't want to.
If its just to modify materials I reckon you can make a dummy vert and give all the material slots and then you can adjust them from that
Also true. And for materials, it would greatly help if the shader editor could just show any shader of the blend file.
also to modify modifers and geometry data such as smoothing angle etc. Would be handy for object properties such as ray visibility, custom properties, and all that good stuff.
Even if they remained selectable in the blend file mode of the outliner would be a solution, if the devs preferred not to mess with collections being un-expandable once disabled.
But making disabled collection's content would have an impact on performance I reckon 🤔
IMHO the problem is, yet again, that hidden content is unelectable and thus unworkable. Make them selectable, and you solve that issue by just hiding the collection while being able to work on hidden content.
Yep, that's what I mean. Make them selectable so you can edit their properties. Useful if you have a collection of objects only used for instancing, and you don't want to actually see them in the render.