So I just finished the simulating smoke episode and am learning so many great things with this course as a beginner but I was wondering what are more use cases for instancing collections vs parenting objects together, I think they have they're own benefits though but was curious.
The main benefit is memory usage. When you are working simple and you're just working on one model it's no big deal, but when you're making a much more complex scene and your computer is screaming for resources, you have to use ways available wherever you can to save up on memory. Instancing is referencing an original mesh and it's not doubling up and consuming memory, so you can instance the same mesh lots and lots of times and there's barely a jump on memory usage, contrary to duplicating where is doubling up all the time and then before you realize, your computer is screaming. And then another good thing about instancing, you can make a change to the original and the change will propagate to each copy, instead of having to go one by one.
oh ok so its the same thing as instancing objects but you can do it with entire collections too, good to know! Is there a limit to how big the collection gets before its to much to instance?
I don't think so, I've never ran into a limit before. I can't say I've put that much stuff in there before either. I bet you'd have to abuse the collection pretty wildly for Blender to scream that's enough. This can always be tested but nah, let us find that out organically one day.