Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Objects Go Missing

Occasionally, you might run into a problem where not everything shows up in your 3D View, even though you're positive you didn't delete anything. The first thing to do is to make sure that nothing is hidden. Pressing H in Blender hides whatever you've selected, and it's easy to accidentally hit it when you're actually trying to press G and grab an object. Fortunately, you can unhide all hidden objects pretty quickly by pressing Alt+H. You can also look in the restrict columns on the right side of the Outliner. If your object is hidden, the first icon — the eye icon — appears closed. Left-clicking the eye icon unhides it. The camera icon on the far right controls whether your object is visible when rendering.

If you're sure that nothing is hidden, next try to make all layers visible and check to be sure that you didn't inadvertently move your object to a different layer. You do so by pressing the Tilde (~) key. You may also want to press Home in the 3D View to bring all objects into view.

One last thing to check is whether you're in Local View, the view that isolates all objects except for a few that you select. The hotkey that toggles this view is Numpad Slash (/), and it can be pretty easy to accidentally hit it when using the numeric keypad to change views. One quick way to tell whether you're in Local View is to look at the header for the 3D View. If no layer buttons are where they're supposed to be, you may be in Local View. In the upper left corner of the ...