Architectural Modeling With Reusable Interactive 3D Objects

3D modeling is extensively used in many engineering fields, notably in architecture. 3D models of new buildings are built with 3D objects taken from object libraries provided by producers of real objects (i.e. windows, lifts, etc). Such libraries can also include interactive 3D objects that are not only static geometrical representations, but also behave like their real counterparts. Searching for such interactive object in a large library requires object metadata describing object interaction properties. Existing metadata standards are not sufficient for describing object interactions. In this paper a new solution for interactions metadata is presented. The new solution is composed of concepts and tools for modeling an interaction, describing different aspects of an interaction, building XML documents with interaction metadata and using information contained in these documents to search specific objects. The usage of all those concepts and tools is presented in a detailed scenario from the field of architectural modeling.