Model freezing

One of the issues that designers are most concerned about is the protection of their intellectual property within a model.

In an environment where the exchange of informations is vital to the process, one can not refuse to cooperate and share his model with other stakeholders involved, plain and simple.

There are different ways to protect the intellectual property without affecting the data exchange, such as using a different file format (e.g. DWF, IFC, etc..) but there's nothing we can do when it comes to native file format for authoring platforms like Revit.

Or maybe not.

I've been looking to the new functionality shown by Jeremy Tammik in his blog, the DirectShape, intended to allow the users to import geometry created in other softwares through other formats like OBJ for instance.

What I was trying to accomplish instead was to create a DirectShape from the actual model, retrieving a solid and fill the voids left by the rooms for 3D printing optimization, I'm still struggling on this particular issue since rooms appear to end up as solids with negative volumes.

Then came to mind a possibile application, the model freezing: one can select a portion of the model that wants to lock and eventually use it as a component. in other projects.

In theory it is possible to freeze the entire model, obtain a generic model, copy and paste it into a blank project, and deliver that to a third party.

The odd thing is that the family created through this process has no Type and it is not even listed in the family browser, so it can't be edited and saved in anyway.

The generic model is not editable and won't even export to CAD for what it matters, the only workaround I found was to export it to IFC.

In this case all of the data is retained except for the 3D geometry and some material information (just the appereance because tagging won't work).