Hi Martin,
Thanks for responding! I have an animated contraption in a collection that I need to duplicate around an environment. They are all identical contraptions, but I want to offset the animation so they appear to be different in that respect. I could duplicate them, but they are a bit heavy and I can’t afford to spend days rendering each frame. So it’s mainly a performance thing. I also tried to export Alembic files and re-import them, but soon discovered that they don’t save material information. Though I could reassign the materials after import, but that’s a lot of work. Other file options either don’t support animation or materials. This appears to be a highly requested Blender feature that hasn’t happened yet – the ability to enable an animation offset for multiple collection instances. Again, Alembic can do the offset, but it doesn’t support materials. My only thought at this point is to duplicate a few of the contraptions (maybe 5) and then instance the rest, (13 in total) so it gives the impression that each one is unique. Any ideas?
Thanks!
-Scott
