I thought this was made available in the Wildfire 4 release cycle, but it appears that I was wrong (blame my rapidly increasing years) – anyway, this is good stuff. PTC has released a new add-on (for Extension as they like to call them) that allows you to integrate a digital mannequin into your product models. The human models can be customised according to a pretty wide range of human factors inputs, whether that’s gender, race, nationality and they conform to the H-ANIM standard (ISO/IEC 19774).
Pro/Engineer Manikin Extension seems to let you put the human form into your models, while the more advanced version which lets you analyse your humans against “a number of quantitative human factors, and workplace standards and guidelines.”
But what I love the most is the fact that PTC is an impressive company all round, has some fantastic tools and technology that is, despite the message from many vendors, still highly active in many sectors – the stories we’ve been writing about industrial designers and product developers, backs this up – but when they put together their product pages, to show off a tool that’s modern, fresh and pretty impressive choose to show the female variant of the mannequin stood at a sink (as below). Either that or its a dude with a pony tail. Either way, its pretty outdated.
