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  • Published 27 Apr 2025

Please add ways to disable light-overlays without turning the lights off

It's a mystery why this isn't already the case and perhaps this already has been asked a thousand times by other but just in case it haven't, as this is such an important thing I keep on bumping into:

All the overlay-lines of lights are making the interface super cluttered and difficult to use. But when disabling the light in the visibility menu the light itself is also turned off, which is obviously not what we want. We only want to turn off its lines-overlay in the viewport. (when we want to turn lights themselves off it's easy enough to do that in the outliner or use a lights addon for it)

Therefor I propose two features:

  1. Please make the light setting in the 'Selectability and Visibility' menu never turn off the light itself, only the 'selectability and visibility' (so its overlay in the viewport). Or else add a new visibility setting for the light overlays so we can individually turn on/off the lights and their overlays.

  2. Please add a checkbox to the light settings of the light: 'show overlay in viewport' (default 'checked')

I think this would make working in large scenes with lots of lights so much easier to handle.

Thanks for considering!

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 6 Downvote 1
Maarten77
27 Apr 2025

3 Comments

Lauloque

I have to disagree on that idea:

But when disabling the light in the visibility menu the light itself is also turned off, which is obviously not what we want.

If you hide an object, it's normal and expected to not see that object or its effect on its surroundings in the render. It's what it's meant to do, it's what it is expected, going against that just for lights would be the unexpected and counterintuitive behavior:
Nobody expects that hiding a mesh object would still let it block off the light and project shadows, we have dedicated solutions designed specifically for that.

What we need is an overlay visibility option dedicated to light objects only. Which, as pointed by romboutv, has already been requested: Add a Specific Lights Category in Object Overlays. ⁠— Right-Click Select

Right now the lights' overlays are part of the "Extras" overlay option, so we can hide their overlays, but it takes out other overlays with them, e.g. the cameras'.

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romboutv

Ps sort of same request was asked here blender.community/c/rightclickselect/x1Qq/

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romboutv

I would suggest this for all types then, this would make It also perhaps more probable they would implement such an option. The overlay visibility settings would get an extra row named "outline" or something.

drive.google.com/file/d/1OxSgUxnHk4t9MBSoxLnEBX9HGrmZUEZ9/view

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