While working on one of our pipelines I had to find a way to prevent artist touching certain object. But I still needed access to them in code and be able to modify and delete them.

So I tried locking the objects and hiding them from the scene. But the problem was that they still existed in the outliner. So artists would sometimes clean the objects up or move them around.
Heck one of the artists even accidentally figured out how to unlock the objects and delete it. (dont ask me how).

So I needed to come up with a way to prevent this from happening:

Now I found out there is one thing that scares an artist more than spiders do to a little girl and that is traversing through the hyper graph. (and showing all non dag objects in the outliner :P)

So if you mark an object as an intermediateObject then it will no longer show up in the outliner nor will it be visible in the scene.
The only way to still see it is by traversing in the hypergraph or knowing where you left it :D. Or doing a in Edit Deformers.

So next time if you dont want an artist to accedentally select, modify, delete an object do a:

*note as soon as you connect the intermediate object the transform will disappear.