Hello everyone, I am trying to figure out if it’s possible to hide the original object that is being added to the collection from render but keep it visible while instancing (showing it on the instancer) because if I toggle the render off in the scene/object settings of the original model, the whole thing will disappear from the entire scene. For example, I have a model (red suzzane), I parented empty to the plane (so I can switch collections later on), then I did the array, curve, etc. Are there any ways around it?
If you are instancing with parenting and object properties, by default, children object that is instanced is shown in viewport but not in render.
That is true for an instance of collection, too. You will see it in viewport and not in render. But you have to exclude original collection from view layer to avoid to see it in render.
If you want to tweak original mesh while seeing, you can do it in another view layer, that will be disabled for render.
Or you can use geometry nodes to instance objects. That way, instanced object and object handling GN modifier are two different objects with viewport visibility or renderability treated separately.
Instanced object is something that can be modified on the fly.
But if you want to instance collections, you will encounter same problem. Same solution of switching to another View Layer can work.