Collections

In this section, we will learn about collections in the  Outliner to help structure our work.

What are collections?

Collections are sort of like folders (like on the desktop) to store data like objects, lights, cameras, and more. They are used to:

• Separate parts of the scene, think about a street with houses, with a street, walkways, trees, bushes, cars, houses, and utilities collections. Essentially organizing your scene to keep everything tidy.
• They are used for rendering to enable the visibility or influence other objects indirectly, this will be shown in the Compositing Techniques.
• Collections are used for instancing to efficiently reuse data.

Open a new Blender file, delete the Cube, Camera and Light objects, add a single  Cube,  UV Sphere &  Monkey.

If you take a look at the  Outliner, we can see that Blender put all the objects in the same collection. Let's place each object into its own collection and assign it a color.

New collections

Hover your mouse in the  Outliner and press RMB > New Collection. As you can see, we have a new collection name, "Collection 2". Rename this collection to "Sphere" by double-clicking with LMB or by selecting the  collection (highlighted text with blue banner) and pressing F2. You can rename any selected object using F2 with your cursor in the 3D Viewport.

Placing object

Now simply hold LMB and drag the "Sphere" object into the "Sphere" collection. Do this with the "Suzanne" and "Cube" object too. You can also use Shift and Ctrl to increase the selection.

Excluding

Since our objects are placed inside collections, the collection decides if the objects inside are visible. There are different toggles (by default) / /  we can choose, but let's keep it simple and "  uncheck" the "Cube" collection. This means that any object in this collection won't be visible and rendered in our final image.

Duplicating collection

We can select the "Suzanne" collection followed by RMB > Duplicate Collection. This will create the same suffix as discussed earlier, since the names are identical.

Deleting collection

You might think we can delete the "Suzanne.001" collection by using X or Del. But this will only delete the collection, not its contents. If you want to delete everything in the collection, use RMB > Delete Hierarchy.

Color Tagging

We can assign colors to the collection to make a better visual distinction. Let's assign red to the "Suzanne" collection RMB > Set Color Tag. This way, you can organize all the Monkeys (Suzannes) into a single collection.

That was the end of the lesson. We have learned:

• What Collections are and how they can work.
• Renaming using F2.