Overview

Welcome to the Human Builder User's Guide!
This guide is intended for users who need to become quickly familiar with the product.

This overview provides the following information:

• Human Builder in a Nutshell

• Before Reading this Guide

• Getting the Most Out of this Guide

• Accessing Sample Documents

• Conventions Used in this Guide

Human Builder in a Nutshell

Human Builder is based on a best-in-class human modeling system which, for many years, has permitted detailed investigation into human-centered design issues in the context of a workplace before it physically exists. Human Builder provides very accurate simulation of humans and their interactions with products to ensure they will operate naturally in a workplace tailored to their tasks. The Human Builder product specifically focuses on creating and manipulating digital humans for "first level" human-product interaction analysis.

Human Builder consists of a number of advanced tools for creating, manipulating and analyzing how manikins (based on the 5th, 50th and 95th percentile value) can interact with a product. The manikins can then be used to assess the suitability of a product for form, fit and function. The manikins can be intuitively created and manipulated in conjunction with the digital mockup to check features such as reach and vision. A simple-to-use interface ensures that first-level human factors studies can be undertaken by non-human factors specialists.

Tools contained within the Human Builder product include manikin generation, gender specification, percentile specification, direct kinematics and inverse kinematics manipulation techniques, animation generation, monocular, binocular and ambinocular vision simulation, as well as vision output cones.

Before Reading this Guide

Before reading this guide, you should be familiar with basic Version 5 concepts such as document windows, standard and view toolbars. Therefore, we recommend that you read the Infrastructure User's Guide that describes generic capabilities common to all Version 5 products. It also describes the general layout of V5 and the interoperability between workbenches.

You may also like to read the following complementary product guides, for which the appropriate license is required:

• Human Posture Analysis

• Human Measurements Editor

• Human Activity Analysis

Getting the Most Out of this Guide

To get the most out of this guide, we suggest that you start reading and performing the step-by-step Getting Started tutorial. This tutorial will show you how to create a standard manikin and a hand/forearm model, and how to change manikin display attributes.

Once you have finished, you should move on to the User Tasks section of the book that provides procedures for using the features of Human Builder.

The Workbench Description section describes each functional icon or command in the workbenches.

The Glossary provides definitions of terms specific to Human Builder and related products.

Navigating in the Split View mode is recommended. This mode offers a framed layout allowing direct access from the table of contents to the information.

Accessing Sample Documents

To perform the scenarios, sample documents are provided. For more information about this, refer to "Accessing Sample Documents" in the Infrastructure User's Guide.