Allow keying of Collection's hide & hide_render properties.
Currently, if I need to hide a collection of objects in a project I plan to render, the best solution available is to key each individual hide & hide_render in a collection of 50 objects... but let's face it, that's insane! For the sake of my own sanity however, whenever possible I parent the collection of objects to an empty and scale the empty to 0 and move it far away from the rest of the scene. This however is very inefficient and hacky.
Upon first trying 2.8 I saw those little hide and hide_render icons in the outliner for collections and thought "Finally, a solution to the world's easiest problem!" But it turned out they're not keyable. And neither are view layer collection excludes. So I'm still forced to parent my collections to empties and doing my hack.
Can we please implement a better way of keying collection visiblity? It's absolutely doing my head in that there's still no elegant solution to this problem.
If my collection relates to objects that are all over the place (ie, not relating to a single group of objects, like the components of a car, but objects that have no spacial relation to one another, like miscellaneous objects scattered about a room), then I can't even do the empty parent thing because some objects may have parents already established that are essential. In that scenario I have to key each individual object and it adds a huge amount of clutter to the dopesheet.
2 Comments
I have generaly 2 scenes : One for working and one for the render.
The working scene have all the collection like a normal scene. The render scene have only instance collections of the root collections of the working scene. I animate the visibility of the instance collections.
I run into this problem when I animate Destruction. Hundreds of fragments need to explode into view and having to key the visibility/render for each fragment is insane but I have not found a good workaround. The other option is render in two passes, render the part where the fragments are hidden alone. Then switch the visibility on the collections and render the other half... it's annoying. Or like you said parent all the pieces and scale/move the parent out of view but it is a hacky workaround compared to the proposed solution and would'nt address cases like yours.