Keyframe toggle visibilty for child object using parent object in outliner?

Question

I have a parent object with over twenty child objects. I want these objects to be keyframed to toggle viewport visibility & restrict rendering on and off at a certain points in the timeline, using the parent object alone as a master controller (so I won't have to insert keyframes for every child object every time). I've discovered how to switch the viewport visibility and restrict rendering for all objects at once (ctrl+click on the parent's visibility or restrict rendering buttons), but that doesn't add the keyframes to the child objects in the outline; I have to add those manually.

My question is: is there a way to use the parent object to assign keyframes to all of the child objects for the viewport visibility and restrict renderable options in the outline area?

Answer 1

Consider a [driver] which assigns to the child render state the value of the parent render state. If you have never done this before it really is the best.

All the navigation described below might best be understood with a video at some famous video site ... Search Blender Driver Tutorial... but I will provide a modest navigation here.

Use the other mouse click to bring up the menu on the EYE of the child to add driver. When finished the purple circle will appear as depicted below.

Switch to the graph window as indicated above and view the [drivers] via the button next to the word Key on the menu. Click on the Restrict Render on the left side to see the driver settings.

Make these settings. Just as in the image above.

Type: Averaged Value.

Prop: name of your parent.

Path: hide_render (which was copied as a data path)

Thus you need to key frame the Restrict Render Eye of the parent only.

There are ways to copy and paste drivers from the menu of the Eye of the child. You need to do this for each of the remaining 20 or so child objects.

In your case you have parented the children to the parent. The driver mechanism can allows you to choose any object to be the source of the render state.