Can you hide lights in the viewport rendering view..without loosing its emission

Hi guys,

So I have a scene with a 4 point lighting. Big light panels surround my object. Pretty close to the object aswell.
I use the viewport rendering view to see (in real time) what the light is doing and just to get an idea.

I have turned my lightpanels off (object>deselect camera) so they dont show in the viewport render view…And still show their light emmission…

But what I would also like…is to hide the panels in the 3d viewport (normal view) aswell. I use this one for my modelling, but those lightpanels are always obstructing my view. But when I hide the panels… their light emission also disapears from my viewport render view. I would love to keep their effect…but hide them in my viewport normal view…

So hiding the light in viewport normaln view…but keeping its effect in the viewport render view…

How can I do this?

ps I realise that the title isnt correct… I meant hiding the lights in normal 3d view… and at the same time hiding it in rendered 3d view… without loosing its emiision …

ps I know I can single out my objects by pressing /…but that’s not giving me a overview of my scnene.

So I assume you are talking about Cycles. You can edit the nodes of the lights and mix the emission with transparent shader with Light Paths node’s Is Camera Ray as a factor:

You can also set Maximum Draw Type to Wire in the object properties panel to partialy hide them in the viewport:

Hi, thank you for your answer!

THe second option is pretty straightforward and will do fine… However, im not getting the first option to work.
I have change my lightpanels material to the node setup that you described… The panel itself is not showing up in the viewport/render view… but its still showing in the viewport/normal view.

Is there something im missing? Rayvisitibily for camera is checked (uncheck doesnt make a difference).

Please advice.

kind regards

That sounds about right. It should just hide it in rendered mode. I was not sure I understood the problem completely. I think you could select Only Render under Display tab in the n panel in 3d viewport to hide the wireframe as well, but it hides a lot of stuff like selection highlighting as well. Backface Culling in the same n panel under Shading section might be useful because it will let you see through the back faces of the lights. I think that is it. I cannot think of anything else that is currently possible in Blender.

Well… camera and viewport clipping is sometimes usefull to hide stuff closer to the camera. I often use it to help navigate in more crowded space. But that’s probabbly another thing.

Thanks for your reply…
I only basically want to hide my lightpanels in my viewport (normal view), and I want to hide the lighpanels in my viewport (render view). However… in the viewport (renderview), i DO want the actual light to emit. So I dont want to see the lightpanel object…but I do want the light effect/emission.

So your second sulotion, enables me to turn the lightpanels into wireframes in viewport normal mode… which is close to what I want. And I still get the light emission in the viewport (rendered mode).

Ill try that clipping advise you posted earlier, thank you for that. I jsut want to have a clean view of my scene so that might help…

Moved from “Tutorials, Tips, and Tricks” to “Lighting and Rendering”