Object visibility with DupliVerts

Hi all,

Not sure this is the right section, but I’ll give it a try; Earlier this week I created a scene with a subdivided Plane transformed in to a wireframe, then I parented an Sphere to the wireframe and set dupli type to verts in the Datablocks section. In my first result I managed to keep both objects (wireframe & dupli spheres) visible and also being able to give both object different material settings.

Today I tried to rebuild a similar scene but i can’t get both objects visible like in the previous version. Now only the dupli-spheres are being displayed.

I made a .blend file with both versions in it. Can anyone tell me why in the upper scene the wireframe is not being displayed?

thx!

1a.blend (854 KB)

Never mind, after adding a particles system it was all sound again. Does anyone perhaps know the filosofy behind this behavior?

when you set your object to be a dupli parent it gets hidden in render, there’s no much you can do about that, but adding a zero particles system to make it visible again is a nice trick I didn’t know, thanks

Basically, with only dupliverts, we use 2 objects with same mesh.
Doubling the subdivided plane was probably what you did.
When dupliverts are used many characteristics are inherited from parent relation used to make it works.
And it was worst in the past. At their creation, a Wireframe material on parent would have been expanded to its duplis.
And rendering the mesh would have hidden half mesh of rendered duplis.
Wireframe modifier is a lot more recent than dupli-system.
So, it was rarely a good idea to use only one object for the whole.

Particles are re-using same old dupli-system that the one used by dupliverts.
But for particles system, a Render Emitter option was added to render hair and character mesh at same time.
It is On by default.

So basically, you don’t need to enable dupliverts at all. You can emit sphere from verts and render emitter with the particle system.
For blender, it is equal. Particles just have a lot of settings to deal with (emit from verts, emission start/end/life, no physics, object visualisation…) compared to dupliverts.