Although Views encourage certain users to only modify certain attributes, it is still possible for a user to inadvertently access and change attributes that they shouldn’t. To greatly increase the integrity of your asset, you can set it to Black Box mode.

When Black Box mode is turned on, users can only see the asset itself and all of its published attributes and published nodes. A user cannot open the asset in the Outliner, Hypergraph, or other editors, to view the unpublished attributes and unpublished nodes inside. An additional benefit of this is that it greatly decreases the complexity of scenes in editors since it reduces entire trees of objects to a single node representation.

To turn on Black Box mode

1. In the Outliner, select Fire_truck_AST.
2. In the Attribute Editor, in the Asset Attributes section, turn on Black Box.

Now if you look at the Outliner, the expand icon next to Fire_truck_AST has disappeared. If you try clicking it, Maya does not allow you to expand it to see its children.