Blender tutorial: Animate the render visibility of collections
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange answerers point people to it when asking how to keyframe hiding or showing a collection, since it gives a simple instance-based method without drivers.
Recommended by 3 people across 3 different months, 2020 to 2023.
What it is
A short Blender tutorial by Christoph Werner showing how to animate the render visibility of collections with keyframes on the timeline. It works around Blender's lack of built-in collection visibility animation by using a collection instance instead of drivers.
What people said
Recommends Juan José Peña Becerra · 2020-12 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Keying visibility of object collections with single property in 2.8?”
An approach using a Collection Instance [LINK] : Instance to Scene the collection you want to animate: [LINK] Hide the original collection in rendering and the viewport, by unchecking the associated box. Insert Keyframes to your new instance in Disable in Viewport or in Disable in Renders from the outliner: [LINK] Repeat the last step in different frames, changing the visibility with each new keyframe. The same approach is described from 3:15 to 3:40 in Blender tutorial: Animate the render visibility of collections - YouTube [this video] . Also note : You can not animate single objects that were in the original collection, the collection instance is treated as a single object.
Recommends Jag JB · 2022-03 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Hide Object or Collection using Keyframe”
By using an instance of the collection, you can keyframe its visibility/rendering. I found it in this tutorial: [this video] It's a bit tedious to properly position the instanced collection but afterwards it works like a charm.
Recommends Bruce Thompson · 2023-03 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Hide Object or Collection using Keyframe”
If anyone is still looking for a good solution for this, I found this short tutorial that makes hiding and unhiding collections super easy [this video]