RenderWhy 1.0.0 · offline guide
Find the exact control in Blender
Show control is a reference card. It never selects, reveals, enables or edits anything for you.
- Use the Outliner in View Layer display mode. Check its scene and layer against the card.
- Expand the complete numbered ancestor chain. A shared Collection can occur under more than one parent; do not identify it only by the final name.
- If the column is missing, open the Outliner header’s Filter (funnel) → Restriction Toggles and expose the named column. This changes a UI column, not object visibility. Factory settings hide the monitor while showing eye/render.
- Close Filter and read the cell on that exact owner row. You may deliberately change native controls outside the inspector; then Refresh the snapshot.
| Control | Native location / scope |
|---|---|
| Object monitor/render | Outliner monitor/render column, or Object Properties → Visibility → Show In → Viewports / Renders. Global object setting. Show In is the inverse of raw hide_*. |
| Object eye | Eye on the object’s row in the named layer. Temporary viewport state; not monitor or render. |
| Collection monitor/render | Named Collection’s monitor/render cell. Affects every use of that Collection, across occurrences and layers. |
| Occurrence Include / eye | Include/checkmark or eye on the exact ancestor-path occurrence in the named view layer. Include is the inverse of exclude. The eye is layer-local. |
| Camera rays | For an accessible object in Cycles: Object Properties → Visibility → Ray Visibility → Camera. |
| Holdout / Indirect Only | Expose the native restriction column or read Collection Properties → Visibility → View Layer on the accessible occurrence. These are intentional roles. |
| Object holdout / shadow catcher | Object Properties → Visibility → Mask → Holdout / Shadow Catcher, in Cycles. |
When an excluded descendant is inaccessible
Blender may not expose the descendant or its Object Properties context without changing scene context. Read the card’s accessible blocking ancestor and its Include control. The inspector does not enable it, suggest removing animation, or claim that a click-through already occurred.
To target a fully excluded original object, use the scene-object picker. In Blender File Outliner display mode, an exposed original object datablock also has Explain Visibility in its object context menu; then use the card’s named View Layer when investigating the restriction.
Current values and animation
A card rereads the same owner and reports changed-since-snapshot observations. It applies the same conservative provenance classifier: navigation and Refresh cannot turn an animated raw value into a verified current-frame value.