Whenever you have an object under a group or layer that is hidden in some way (viewport or render visibility), when you open the visibility property panel, it shows a little blue arrow to the left of the check box, and the check box is greyed out. Is there any way to find what is overriding that property page? It seems the little blue arrow should be a link to the thing that is controlling the object's visibility option.
I ask because every time I merge this object into my scene it comes in with the render visibility overridden by something I cannot find in my scene. I need to figure this out, because my deadline is fast approaching.
This is because the objects you merge are overriden in the other scene, and what overrides them is not brought to the new scene. You have to pay extreme care to these things. Most of time layers are the source of these headaches.
Maybe duplicating the object will remove the override?
I realize there's a lot of things about this project I'm not doing the best way, but I have to work with what I know in the time I have.
Turns out it was because of my render passes I had set up. There was a background partition set to not let anything in it render. When I merged the scene, the object was put in the background partition and overridden to not render. I moved it out of that partition and it works fine now.
I had tried using the "inspect override" option you get in the object's visibility dialog, but it didn't work. According to tech support it's a documented bug. No word on a fix, though. That would be quite useful if it actually worked. Live and learn, though . . .