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I have around 100 objects all parented to an Empty. I want all of them to be invisible in the render starting at frame 10 and onward.

I tried animating the Render Visibility (camera icon) of the Empty at frame 10, but that didn’t work — all 100 child objects still appear in the render. I also tried using a collection, but it seems the collection's render visibility can't be animated.

What’s the correct way to do this? Am I left with no choice but to animate the render visibility for all 100 objects individually?

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What you can do is instance a collection to a scene by right-clicking on it in the Outliner and choose Instance to Scene:

instance collection to scene

You then have basically an empty containing a collection instance with which you can move, rotate and scale the complete collection inside the viewport.

The original collection can de deactivated now so it will not show up in the viewport or render. The instanced collection is marked with an orange collection icon:

deactivate original collection

The thing is now, this instance is a single object which can be keyframed like a normal object, i.e. you can animate its visibility and only have to do it once for all objects contained in the collection. Of course you should only place those objects in the collection that you want to hide.

The original collection you only need to activate again if you want to change something in it. The good thing is, changes made to the original collection will automatically change the instanced collection. And since it is an instance, it does not affect the performance much additionally to the original collection.

By the way, you can even do this collection instancing "manually": add an empty to the scene, go to the Object Properties and under Instancing switch from None to Collection and pick a collection in the dropdown menu:

manual collection instancing

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    $\begingroup$ Thank you for this! ♡ $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 10 at 11:30
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    $\begingroup$ @MeganLove You're welcome. I forgot to explicitly mention (but maybe it became clear from what I wrote), with this instanced collection there's also no need to parent the objects to an empty to keep them together when doing any transformations. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 10 at 11:56

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