Say you have a sphere, cube, and cylinder. You have grouped the sphere and cube together and named the group Group1. You want all three objects to remain visible and renderable from frames 1 to 25. Then on frame 26, you want Group1 to disappear.
Meanwhile keep in mind that this group could also be the result of a cell fracture and might contain HUNDREDS of shards.
In order to see Group1 in the Outliner, it seems you must change the “Type of Information to Display” to “Groups” at the top of the Outliner. (Is this the only way?)
You then can see Group1 and its sub-objects. Ideally, you could just toggle the Group1 visibilty and renderability off (and animate them) like you might any normal ungrouped object. However, when in this Groups display mode, the Outliner doesn’t seem to let you insert keyframes on the visibility and rederabilty icons. Clicking on the eye or camera icons adjacent to Group1 does indeed seem to affect all the sub-objects automatically (a good thing), but if you try to insert a keyframe on either icon adjacent to Group1, you only get Edit Source and Edit Translation as options.
So, how do you animate the visibility and renderabilty of a group that might contain hundreds of objects? Note that I have tried the Outliner method (as above) and also played a bit with trying to get the group to move to another layer, but no real joy yet. Maybe I should be parenting them rather than grouping them??
Thanks for any help,
Dave