Empties are never rendered so wouldn’t it make sense for Blender to disable render of all objects parented to an empty? Currently the process of disabling or animating the render property of a lot of objects take an extremely long time and would be great if we could speed this up with either having empties that are disabled in render to disable render of the objects or for collections render property to be able to be animated.
Collections are made for that, child objects inherit render properties.
As for their renderable property not being animatable, it’s a known limitation and I don’t know when it’ll be lifted…
Wouldn’t it be easier to add the ability to empties since it can’t be done with collections?
Would compositing and view layers give you want you want?
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/layers/layers.html
https://cgcookie.com/questions/10943-compositing-w-render-layers-2-8-instructions
If not, you might want to bring up your idea as a feature request.
composite_view_layers.zip (121.2 KB)
Easier I don’t know, but it would certainly break a few things. Collections are made exactly for that : controlling visibility&renderability for children objects. If you take it away to bring the same functionality to regular parenting, then you might as well remove collections altogether.
Maybe make visibility inherited by parenting hierarchy when objects are not in a collection (only in scene collection) ? That would make sense to me and is actually how Maya works (Maya’s “view layers” only take control of object visibility if and when objects are added to them, otherwise the objects inherit visibility from their parent).
it’s a pity you can’t animate the visibility of a collection…
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I’ve tried to find the tasks in question on d.b.o but no luck… I think @dfelinto was the one handling all the collection-related stuff ?
not sure, I honestly haven’t been following too closely the development lately, but I think to remember it is something they should implement at some point.
I really hope so, because it’s something I would have been super glad to use in a lot of occasions already
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As I understand it collections are intended to be used in an ecco system with view layers and composite nodes. This opens up a lot more possibilities.
That said it makes perfect sense to me to be able to animate a bolean on render status to a parent object for children.
I think what you guys are looking for is what is available in Maya. And when making a request for it, showing how it works in another app may support the cause.
well, it’s obviously always good practice to add examples, but in this case I think it’s quite self explanatory: as now you can animate the visibility (viewport or render) of an object, you cannot do it for a collection that would propagate the change to all the children.
As for the “hierarchy” it would work exactly as it does now: if the collection has visibility on, the visibility is controlled “per object” via the individual object settings within that collection. Turning visibility off for a collection, will override the visibility setting for all the objects contained in that collection.
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Usually a feature request is not as much about explaining what you want, but making the case for a broader need. Meaning, is this a feature other professionals have been using. And the truth is a lot of Blender users voicing opinions have not used Maya or anything else. It is about context.
What about objects that are in several collections ? At what point should the object settings override the collection settings ?
Unfortunately we can’t really do that because of intellectual property and the legal risks associated with showing images of other software (at least on devtalk and d.b.o), but a thorough explanation of how it ought to work should do the trick.
There is nothing breaking any intellectual property law to state that software X has a feature. Features are not intellectual property. The code and graphics that make it are. Just ask Joe Alter and see what years of litigation got him over that one.
I posted an image here to illustrate it. That is all. It is not necessary to post images or even links to describe that Maya has X feature. Developers can go and research it themselves.
The point I am making is if you omit that another software has it, you are limiting your context.
Maybe they think that it would make an IP case easier for the Autodesk lawyers if they can point to forum thread where it is stated “we want feature x like Maya” and then some time later feature x pops up in Blender.
I can’t imagine what people are thinking.
At any rate, I think the discussion is a red herring and off topic.
The on topic discussion is that this is a good feature to have. Many other programs have it. Even LightWave has had it for well over two decades as far as I can recall.
I would go almost as far as to say every other program but Blender has this right now.
We definately agree an that. 
I got you!
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I’m just transferring the wishes developers expressed in the past, I’m not the one you want to argue with
Thanks
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Cool man. No worries. 
I hope they add the ability to animate the visibility of collections but until then I found a way that works ok.
As blender lack the ability to add keyframes to all selected items for visibility or add all selected items to a keying set, you need to make a script.
I did a quick script that add the selected objects to a keying set for visibility, now you can easily keyframe the visibility of many objects without even have them selected. Just select the keyingset and add keyframes.
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