Show and Hide child objects along with Parent

Question

I have several Parent objects that each have a lot of child objects. I need to key frame showing/hiding the various different stacks of objects at different points without it becoming too tedious. Ideally, i'd like it if I could set my child objects to share the show/hidden status of the parent object. Is this possible?

Alternatively, is there a way to keyframe the show/hide of a whole selection of objects at once?

Answer 1

Fudge the driver system

Firstly we'll set up a custom driver that sets a property of all children recursively to the value of the parent.

import bpy

def traverse_tree(t):
    yield t
    for child in t.children:
        yield from traverse_tree(child)

def set_children(obj, prop):
    val = getattr(obj, prop, None)
    if val is not None:
        for c in traverse_tree(obj): 
            setattr(c, prop, val)       
    return val    

bpy.app.driver_namespace["setchildprops"] = set_children

Now we can add a driver to a custom property on the same object as the property we wish to set on all children.

setchildprops(self, "hide")

making sure to check the non default "use_self" property of the driver.

Now if you keyframe the "hide" property of the same object it will hide / show children accordingly. Note it will not update the UI automatically, until some property eg frame is updated.

Answer 2

• Consider a driver which copies the Render Visibility value of the parent. This will be successful.

• The objects will still be available for [3D View Window] viewing. Only you can determine if this arrangement suits you.

• You might even copy the [3D View Window] visibility based on the Render Visibility of the parent or any other object.
• Please click on the image below to see a larger image.

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• The purple color on the visibility settings indicates a script. The eye dropper was used for the target ... the parents render visibilty. Arrow indicates the driver.

• Consider the copy and paste of drivers from the context menu.

• The contents of the driver are shown in the graph drivers pane.

• You might even consider layer visibility to avoid clutter.
• If you have a simple still shot ... you can move objects off the viewable area. This idea is for simple circumstances only.