Hello! I’m trying to parent a collection to an empty, but can’t seem to make it happen. How do you parent a collection to an empty?
Thank you!
Afaik that is not possible.
A collection instance might be close enough to what you’re wanting.
Thank you @rigoletto and @Ysengrin for the reply.
So what is the best practice for grouping a large number of objects together, and be able to quickly transform them together? Instance the collection, and then parent the instance to the empty? That would definitely work, it just seems like a lot of steps to group objects together and transforms them.
Is there another way to group objects together and transform them together?
I feel like I just repeated what Ysengrin said, but trying to clarify the process for myself.
Thank you!
It sounds to me like you want to use an “Empty” as the parent of many objects, so that you can transform the group of objects. In which case, it is not a collection, it is an empty with children.
Gotcha, I now understand that collections don’t carry parenting information, and this is the best way to manipulate multiple objects at once. Thank you!
It took me a while to understand collections as well. For me, since I come from Autodesk Maya, collections most closely resemble “Display Layers”.
I am used to Maya’s default behavior of groups acting as invisible empties. It would be very nice if Blender supported such a feature, but for now, it can be achieved using empty objects.
Yes, I’m also a Maya pilgrim and that’s the exact functionality I was missing. Thanks for helping really appreciate it!
After doing a bit of digging, I discovered that you can almost perfectly emulate Maya groups by doing these few steps:
Hey @Neltulz Thank you so much for letting me know, can’t wait to give it a try. Thanks for working on this 
Question, could I bind Cntrl-G to initiate the Group With Empty command? I can’t find Group to Empy in the Keymap search.
Thank you!
I just parent objects to an Empty and stick all of them including the Empty in a Collection.
Right click the “Group with Empty” button and click “Assign Shortcut”
Perfect, thank you again!
This is all valuable and helpful information, but I think it misses the question implicit in the title:
Is it possible to arrange it so that items added to a collection AUTOMATICALLY become children of the Collection’s parent?
iow, so that a Collection has a true parent?
(there’s a bit of stuff to be decided, like ‘what happens to transforms if something is removed from the Collection’, but hey, that’s why we’re here.)