Hi Wayne, thanks for the course. Been a lot of fun to follow along!
I am wondering why you`re creating the object hierarchy with Collections. Wouldn`t it be more handy to use Empty objects instead of Collections, as they allow translations (e.g. on Root level etc.)? Could you elaborate on that?
Hi Sebastian.
That's a good question. It sounds like you have some experience in other software where a 'group' is kind of like an Empty in Blender.
Let me see if I can elaborate on your question.
Collections in Blender are really just a way to organise your outliner, they do not affect the actual hierarchy. 1 object can be a member of many collections, however, the outliner will nest any children under the parent object as grey-out if they are not a member of that collection, or nest them like a normal child IF that object is also part of that collection.
There is talk of future versions of Blender actually having transform abilities to move, rot, scale all the collection members at once. But that is just an idea that is being pondered at this stage.
Collections are also the thing you link (or append) for animation. That's why it's best to put everything into 1 master collection that you link in, and all the stuff inside will follow along.
The main reason not to use Empties to translate or move anything is that that transform information will be stored in an action that is owned be the Empty and any character animation will stored in an action owned by the armature object. That means there's 2 data blocks. If you use multiple empties - you have multiple datablocks for a single 'animation'.
That's why you want the armature object to be the 1 thing that is animated. Yes you can use empties as part of the rig, but you don't need them for organising the outliner, and they shouldn't actually be controls for an animator in addition to them animating the actual armature.
Hope that makes sense.