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Is it possible to hide a particle emitter object in the 3D view while keeping particles visible?
I know you can do this in the render with the Render Emitter setting, but this does not affect the viewport.

Sometimes the emitter can get in the way, though it's still useful to know where it is. The ideal solution then is to make it drawn as a wireframe, but setting the Maximum draw type to Wire or Bounds causes all the particles to be rendered as wireframes or bounding boxes too.

Setting the emitter object's draw type would work, except it also changes the way the particles for that emitter are drawn:

enter image description here enter image description here

Is there anyway to make particle emitters hidden or less distracting while keeping the actual particles unaffected (still rendered as solid or textured)?

gandalf3
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3 Answers3

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Another way (similar to Michal's answer) is to use a Mask modifier:

  1. Add an empty vertex group to the particle emitter by pressing the + button in Object Data > Vertex Groups:

Add a vertex group

  1. Add a mask modifier after the particle system with the empty vertex group:

enter image description here

There was a bug in 2.69; in order for the mask modifier to work you had to assign and remove some geometry to the vertex group. It has since been fixed.

gandalf3
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This is a really old issue, but for anyone coming here recently you can now disable the emitter from the viewport the same way you would to the render. The option is located in the "Viewport Display" section of the particle settings. The option looks exactly the same as it does in the "Render" section where you would hide the emitter from renders, to begin with.

Microbob
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Create a bounding box around the emitter.

Add a boolean modifier to the emitter, set the mode to difference and chose the bounding box.

Ensure the particle system is applied before the boolean modifier (order in modifier stack)

Hide the bounding box.

Properties panel with emitter selected

Michal
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  • Interesting solution, but it can get clunky with animated emitter objects. – gandalf3 Oct 27 '13 at 02:23
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    @gandalf3 well you could probably eliminate the clunk by parenting "Bounding box" as a child of "Cube" but it still adds unnecessary objects and computation time... if you have a 5M-tri mesh, I can't imagine that a Boolean modify would speed up your viewport. – wchargin Oct 27 '13 at 03:02