Once you begin to increase the number of objects within your scene, it becomes more challenging to manipulate singular objects as you have to navigate your view to avoid selecting the wrong one. It can be helpful to hide objects in your scene that you don’t wish to select or edit inadvertently.
You can hide objects within the 3D viewport by selecting them and pressing the H key. Alternatively, you can go to the outliner panel and click on the icon at next to a specific object to hide it from view. You can then restore the view of particular objects by again clicking on that eye icon.
If you can remove your objects from the 3D Viewport temporarily, it can make the modeling process easier for the larger scenes that you create.
Hiding And Restoring Objects Using The Outliner Panel
The preferred way to hide individual objects in Blender is to use the outliner panel to toggle its visibility in the viewport.
If we go to the outliner panel, we will notice a series of icons next to each individual object. By default, this is limited to two icons, but one of these is the icon we are searching for.
The icon indicates that the object is visible within the 3D viewport. It should be highlighted when this is the case.
All objects will be visible in the 3D viewport by default and will only be made invisible due to manual inputs.
By left-clicking on any of these eye icons, you can toggle the visibility of that specific object. For example, clicking on the icon next to our cube object will make the cube invisible in the 3D viewport.
We can hide as many objects in our scene as we wish using the outliner panel, as they all have their own individual icons to toggle.
What makes this the preferred method of hiding our objects is that it’s also easy to restore them. When an object is hidden, the icon closes and is greyed out.
By left-clicking on the icon when it is in this state, it will revert to its original form, and the previously hidden object will become visible again.
Hiding Objects Using The Hotkey
The secondary method of hiding individual objects in your 3D viewport is to use the hotkey system. The hotkey for hiding individual objects in the 3D viewport is the H key.
Select an object in the viewport and then press H on your keyboard, and the objects will disappear from the 3D viewport.
With this functionality, you also have the ability to select and hide multiple objects at once. Just select whatever object you want to hide by holding down shift and left kicking, then press the H key, and all objects that were part of that selection will be hidden.
If you want to hide the majority of objects in your scene, it may be easier to invert the way the hiding key works. If you select the object that you wish to edit and then it used a hotkey Shift + H, then Blender will instead hide all of the objects that were not a part of your selection.
If you want to bring any of your hidden objects back into view, you can instead use the hotkey Alt + H. Regardless of how many objects are hidden, using this hotkey will restore the visibility of all objects in your current scene.
Hiding Objects From The Objects Menu
The third method of hiding objects in the 3D viewport is to go to the objects menu and then go down to where it says show and hide. This will give you the same hide options as the hotkey.
From this menu, you can choose to hide your selected objects, hide the objects that are not selected, or unhide any objects already hidden from view.
Note that this is the least practical of the three methods. You are far better suited within your own workflow to hide either using the outliner panel or the hotkey in the viewport.
Why Do We Need To Hide Objects?
If you are working with a larger scene and need to go back and edit a specific object or a particular part of that scene, then navigating around a viewport becomes more complex as, depending on your angle, you may have other objects that get in the way of your editing and visibility of the selected object.
Hiding an object is not the same as deleting it. We’re merely making it invisible from our view in the 3D viewport. This is incredibly useful if we are to revert back to the modeling stage of our project, as we will be able to more easily edit the objects we want without other models getting in the way.
Does Hiding My Object Prevent It From Being Rendered?
While the hide tool allows us to hide objects from the 3D viewport, it does not hide these objects from our actual renders. This functionality is a part of a different icon in the outliner panel.
It can be easy to forget about this, though, and on more than one occasion, you will be likely to render a scene and have objects that you did not want to be rendered appear in that image because you hid that object from the viewports but not from your render.
In other words, keep track of any of the objects that you have hidden from view and whether or not you have hidden them from your renders as well.
Thanks For Reading
We appreciate you taking the time to read through this article, and we hope you found the information you were looking for. If you are interested in learning more about basic modeling tools in Blender, take a look at some of the other articles we have listed below.
- Why Is Blender Lagging In The Viewport
- Why Do I Need To Apply The Scale Of My Objects
- Converting A Text Object Into A Mesh
- Orbiting Around Your Scene Without A Three Button Mouse
- How To Use The Camera In Blender Beginners Guide
