I first discovered some workflow shortcomings of blender 2.8 when I asked " In blender 2.8 how do you make a local instance of an object in use by multiple scenes? "
Now that I understand collections a little bit more, I can describe what is going on.
When you use New Scene>Linked Copy you end up with linked instances of all your objects, but for objects inside a collection (which is the case for the camera, cube, and light in the default scene) you do not have access to a "make local" button in the object panel. That is because there is only one User of the object: Its Collection.
The collection has been linked to both scenes and that is the "problem".
I can not find a way to make a scene-local copy of that collection.
- Right-clicking on the collection in the outliner brings up a menu with no obvious solutions
- I have not found a tab to manage the properties of a Collection (which would be the natural place for a Make Local button.) This makes collections like second-class citizens compared to objects, meshes, materials, etc.
When I imagine a Make Local operation for collections the obvious (to me) functionality would
- create a new collection which has links to every object in the original collection (objects, subcollections, other things I have not yet realized can belong to collections)
- link this newly created collection to the same container of the original collection (which might be the scene, or might be a parent collection)
- unlink the original collection from its parent in this context, leaving the fresh copy as its replacement.
A complication that I only realized while creating the list above: if the collection is a subcollection (its parent is a collection instead of a scene), it won't immediately become scene-local, because the scene still has the shared parent collection. (maybe another operator we need for this is "make local recurse up")
What am I overlooking? Where is the button/menu that will let me make a scene-local copy of a collection?