Good evening,
Can anyone point me towards the most efficient way to hide the Light Objects in a scene, yet have them still cast light?
Thank you!
The quickest way is per light, select the light, and in the object tab, cycles settings, ray visibility, uncheck âcameraâ
Thank you for your reply Photox.
There are two difficulties Iâm having:
a. Iâm not using Cycles.
b. I switched to Cycles, and I was able to follow exactly what youâre saying. I think that the Ray Visibility switch gets rid of the viewport line display projecting from the Light. The light that the light object casts is still visible. Those are two things that Iâm looking for. However, the Light object itself remains visible in the User Perspective viewport.
Hmm. Another way to put this.
Okay. In any scene using Eevee, create a Point Light. Then go to the outliner and hit the eye icon next to the Light. The Light is no longer visible in the viewport. The light that the Light casts is no longer visible in the viewport.
Iâm looking for that, only I want the light that the Light casts to continue to be displayed.
Man, not sure on Eevee, the camera Ray toggle is what I use for cycles. Is your light by any chance behind glass, because in that case the trick wonât work.
In 2.80, I tend to put lamp objects in their own collection for quick access and management.
To simply hide them in current viewport, I use the âview object typesâ dropdown to disable them:
I only wish we had a global size factor we could use for these helper geometry. Size of lamps and cameras are stupid big for what I do.
3 Likes
Youâd figure weâd have something like that. Iâm still new-ish so I didnât know that there wasnât a global size setting - Iâve been resizing lamp and camera helper geometry one-by-one and it didnât even occur to me to look for a global setting.
Maybe someone who can script can help us out?? 
Same problem. If I go into View Object Types and click the eye icon next to lights, it hides all the Lights AND then it ALSO hides all of the light that the Lights cast. Sigh!
Ok, wait. So you just want to hide the light icon/symbol in solid mode, but still produce light in rendered mode?
I want to hide the Light icon/symbol in Render Preview (Eevee) mode, yet I still want the light that the Light object casts.
(edit)
You can hide all overlays, or within the overlay menu you can disable âextrasâ for lights (And keep grid lines, axes etcâŚ)
6 Likes
Awesome! Thatâs what Iâm talking about. It hides Camera objects and probably some other things Iâll be working with that I donât want to hide in addition to Light objects, but at this point Iâll take what I can get. I even found a script here at BA that allows me to save presets for this sort of thing, so click click and Iâm switched over.
Itâs not perfect, but itâs a start. Really appreciate it Photox. 
Yeah, I was in Cycles rendered mode at the time, works there.