Grouped objects ignore visibility track

Hi folks, I’m making a special film for my wife that’s not rendering as it plays in the viewport.

To summarize what I’m doing (and I can expand more, if it helps) — I have one camera looping around a room. With each pass behind the couch, additional grouped furniture objects pop in and out. The shot was setup as its own sequence and brought into a master sequence with characters/objects included and set with their respective visibility tracks/anims/etc.

Everything works as intended with the exception of grouped objects’ visibility keys.

Here is an example:

This frame should not have the Christmas stuff. I do see that single-item assets I added into Sequencer (the pizza, for example) respect their visibility track, so it’s definitely something to do with the grouped objects added into Sequencer.

If annotating render settings helps:

  • EXR/PIZ
  • Deferred Rendering (default)
  • Game Overrides (default)
  • AA
    • spatial = 1
    • temporal = 16
    • override = yes
    • AA method = None
    • Use CamCut for warmup = no (default)
    • Render warm-up = no (default)
    • Warm up count = 32 (default)
    • Engine warm up count = 100

Thank you in advance for your help. I’m about to experiment with using transforms instead of visibility, but we’ll see what happens. Either way, I’d like to learn what I’m doing wrong here.

Edited the main post after realizing I referenced the wrong photo. It’s accurate now.

Still curious why this is a pain in the butt, even trying to move it out of frame via transforms didn’t work. However, I ended up finding success by placing the group object into a sub-folder in Sequencer, then setting the keys on the actor itself, which auto-inserted all group members into the sequence with the respective keys (outside of the folder, but it was easy enough to shift-A and drag em in for cleanliness).

Not the most ideal solution, but figured I’d offer Google something to reference for anyone else that runs into this issue.

This solution also works with transform keys via the same method, but I did notice undesired shadows/artifacts–even as constants.