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Hide GameObjects from the game camera or the scene view

Hide and seek

Sometimes you want to show or hide some GameObjects without actually deactivating them in the hierarchy. This article shows two built-in methods to do the following:

  • Hide/show GameObjects in game, but show them in the scene view
  • Hide/show GameObjects in the scene view, but show them in game

Hide GameObjects from the main camera​

First, you need to create a Layer named EditorOnly. Go to the Layers tab and create a new layer. Then apply this layer to all the GameObjects you want to hide from the game camera.

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Open the Layers settings

Here is where the magic happens: select your main camera, and disable the EditorOnly layer in its Culling Mask.

Removing the EditorOnly layer from the camera Culling Mask

Enjoy the result below:

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Before: the EditorOnly objects are rendered by the camera

Hide GameObjects in the scene view​

There are two ways of hiding GameObjects in the scene view in Unity.

Hide an entire layer​

The Layers drop-down of the scene view

First, you can choose to hide an entire layer. Notice the little eye eye icon next to each layer. You can click on it to hide or show all the GameObjects on that layer.

By the way, you can also lock layers, to disallow selection in the scene view.

Hide individual GameObjects (Unity 2019+)​

The visibility toggles in the hierarchy since Unity 2019

The second method requires a recent version of Unity. Since Unity 2019, you can also hide each GameObject individually, by clicking on the little eye next to each GameObject in the hierarchy.

info

If you have GameObjects that are never shown in the game, you could also tag them as EditorOnly (with a tag, not a layer) to simply remove them from the build. More info in my article EditorOnly components and actions when building.

See also​