How can I animate a mesh to be transparent without hiding the smoke that it emits also? I recently asked this related question about animating a solid mesh into smoke, and a solution that I might use is to shroud the mesh in smoke heavily whilst the mesh animates to zero opacity, which sounded simple, except there's a problem:

The mesh owns the smoke, and mixing it's material with a transparent shader hides both the mesh and the smoke.

How can I hide the mesh without hiding the smoke also?



One solution that I thought of could be to create a duplicate of the mesh to contain the smoke that is set not to show the smoke emitter, and then as I hide the mesh that is shown, the emitter will remain but the smoke will continue. This would work, but it's a work-around (noob-ish) way to handle it.
If I understand the question correctly... I think you are on the right track.
Simply disable the render-ability of the emitter object like so:



Then duplicate the emitter object and apply to it the shader which animates from opaque to transparent. (As described in this thread -> How can I animate an opaque material to being fully transparent in Cycles?)