The population of the earth has grown, as has global trade. As a result, there are greater numbers of people with varying physical attributes to be considered during product development – be it a set of headphones, the interior of a car, seat on an airplane, or spatial planning of a new facility. Human attributes such as gender, age, body type, and weight are just a few variables that alone create a large and varying range of potential form factors to consider into design requirements such as reach, visibility, fit, and comfort.
Why Practice Human-Centered Product Design?
Developing new product in today’s digital realm without considering how a human will interact with the new product until later in the design cycle can be an expensive oversight. Waiting to test and evaluate the multiple variables of the human experience in the real world on physical prototypes can lead to costly form, fit, and function issues. These can range from unexpected interferences between the operator and product to something as simple as the individual does not fit in the product environment.
The 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA Human Design Solution
3DEXPERIENCE CATIA provides a set of tools with the Human Design app and Human Animation Studio app extension that provides designers with a virtual 3D human-centered design solution to imagine, design, adapt, experience, and review the physical environment compliance with initial Human Factors criteria.
Product designers can create and animate human avatars with advanced cosmetic customization properties and advanced posturing capabilities using the Human Design and Human Animation Studio apps. Having virtual 3D human avatars present in context of the 3DEXPERIENCE digital design environment, product designers have the ability to perform conceptual human-centered design to enhance the product and environment by providing:
- Improved scale perspective to the product by including a virtual 3D human
- Visualization of how a human will interact with a design/product/environment
- Detection of potential interferences between the virtual human model and the product/environment
- First person view from the virtual human perspective to detect potential vision issues (such as potential blind spots)
- Foundation for creating rich marketing and presentation materials with advanced renderings containing realistic materials and background ambiances
The Human Design app and supporting Human Animation Studio app extension for animated simulations deliver an easy-to-use solution where the power of Inverse Kinematics (IK) is already defined within the virtual human model, making it simple to manipulate the virtual human by simply selecting a body part (e.g. hand or arm) and using the robot (aka Compass for V5 users) to position.
And what’s more, the Human Design app is included with many 3DEXPERIENCE engineering based roles. Perhaps you already have the app and don’t know it – to find out if you do, select the 3DEXPERIENCE Compass and then select your active Role(s) to see a list of all the included apps.
Before continuing, it is important to note that the virtual human avatars created from the Human Design app are not anthropometrically accurate and should be used for preliminary work. Where a more accurate analytical ergonomic solution is required, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform offerings include dedicated Ergonomics roles or RAMSIS for 3DEXPERIENCE extensions that enable:
- Design based on anthropometric requirements
- Increased accuracy for Vision, Reach, Comfort, Force, and Safety
- Using anthropometrically accurate models and posture prediction
That said, 3DEXPERIENCE 2022x introduced the VR Incarnation function that provides the ability to define improved accuracy of the virtual human avatar environment. This is accomplished by users synchronizing their real-world features such as height and reach to their virtual human avatar in the 3DEXPERIENCE environment – more details on this topic below.
How to Use the 3DEXPERIENCE Human Design App
3DEXPERIENCE Manikin Types and Appearances
The 3DEXPERIENCE Human Design app provides three types of manikins – also known as Human Templates – to create human avatars. Each of the Human Templates offer their own unique purpose and features in the 3DEXPERIENCE virtual environment:
- First Generation Model – Useful for conceptual design where the importance is placed on the appearance of the manikin for presentations, such as applying textures and clothing.
- Generative Human – Although not anthropometrically accurate, the Generative Human template provides users with the ability to sculpt the body and shape of the manikin to provide a more realistic representation of body types, ages, and gender.
- HD Model – Useful for presentations and marketing material where the emphasis is on a high-resolution model for realistic and rendering scenarios.
Below is an image that provides representations of a 3DEXPERIENCE virtual design environment contains representations of each of the three Human Templates.
Below is a tabular breakdown of what type of actions can be performed with each Human Template type:
Human Design – Instantiate & Posture
Introducing a virtual human to your design environment provides an enhanced level of detail to the design environment, where the action of adding the virtual human is a simple pick and place action. The instantiated Human Template is represented in the Tree as its own unique 3DEXPERIENCE object that can be configured, saved, and re-used. Depending on the selected Human Template, the properties of the virtual human avatar can be configured to the desired result through an easy-to-use interface. Initially users define the body type, proportions, and other visual appearances. Below is a list of the different properties that can be configured:
- Body type and face shape
- Body proportions
- Clothes, accessories, and makeup
- Posture
- Materials for special effects
Below is an image that provides representations of a 3DEXPERIENCE virtual design environment contains representations of each of the three Human Templates.
Human Design – Posturing in the Environment
Once the virtual human avatar is configured and placed in the digital environment, designers can easily set the manikin posture using a library of predefined postures. The library of predefined postures includes numerous common postural categories including Standing (e.g. jogging), Sitting (e.g. driving), and others including Crouching. The predefined posturing is also extended to common Hand Postures to manage the numerous grip positions of the human hand. For custom postural scenarios, designers can save and recall user-defined postures.
Alternatively, the Human Design app provides a manual method of defining the posture to create a new posture to add to the existing library and/or fine tune an existing posture to meet the requirements in the design environment. In addition to posturing the manikin, 3DEXPERIENCE provides the ability to defining predictive posturing for grip where designers can configure the hands of the manikin to interact with the digital models in their environment (e.g. gripping a steering wheel).
WATCH VIDEO: Human Design app posture and grip