neldome furgus olyana
Twyla Plack
My current library of Creo Manikins doesnt have any that meet the MIL-STD-1472G that I am looking for. Is there a way to create your own custom manikin? Basically I have a table with reach and lengths of different parts of the body and want to be able to input that into the program.
Sadly, it will take an enormous amount of effort to do so because '1472 isn't describing the geometry of people. It is describing what equipment and clothing makers need to know about people. What one needs to make a model is the distance between the joints that form the shoulders and hips and ankles (and so on) and then the size of the bone and muscle and fat and skin that covers those joints; this has been absorbed into composite descriptions.
PTC sells the Human Factors Analysis Extension which they based on some gathering of data and have models that use "H-ANIM standard: ISO/IEC 19774" compatible data structures. I am sure the module comes with a good selection of models and should read others which might be available via Siemens' "Jack" software (History of Jack - _(human_modeling)
2.) While there are percentile manikins, the 7 'standard' humans that the US government bases things on are not there. In particular, the wide shoulder male is not even close to being represented by any of the manikins.
So...I go to edit one of the parts (the left calf). Creo 4 refuses to open it because it is a Manikin component. I open the part in Creo 3. I insert the accurate version of the left calf, hide the surface that was representing the left calf (because it can't be deleted), and save. I reopen the manikin in Creo 4. At this point the only thing changed is a hidden surface and an added body in a part. It opens with the new left calf. Then I try to apply a posture and Creo refuses because "Could not perform the operation because the manikin is not complete". My company has multiple different manikin licenses but none of them let me edit a component. None of them let me edit a manikin directly. I can hide/show things, I can make changes to layers, I can even add additional parts...but I can't modify the parts that come with it. As for that additional parts thing, it's not really ideal because whenever you change posture you need to do a regen...and in our assemblies that can take an hour easy. The parts built into the manikin don't have that issue.
From everything I can tell, PTC locked down the manikins. For some reason they don't want anyone making changes to them even if they bought every Manikin license offered. This is only compounded by the fact that PTC won't make good (or at least up to date) manikins. I've been fighting with this for the last week...I have all the licenses offered, I even have 3 different versions of Creo installed so I can get around some of the locks. Yet still, even if I get around the locks on part modification, the program just refuses to move the manikin with those modified parts.
It's starting to feel like the Creo way...it seems like every new feature is either something that everyone else had 10 years ago or it's something that looks really useful until you actually buy it and find out that PTC has blocked you from using it in a useful way for no reason. I'm about ready to just make manikins using simp-reps and consider the whole manikin add-on to be snake oil.
I hope that this will serve as a useful reference to system administrators who would like to provide a manikin library for their users with far greater ease of use than what is provided out-of-the-box from PTC. This is a long procedure, but you'll only have to do it once, and it'll make everyone's lives easier if you do.
You can download the full manikin library from PTC's Creo Parametric Software Download page. You won't find it listed under the latest releases though; expand Release Creo 1.0 / Creo Manikin Population Data 2.1 / Most Recent Datecode. After you download and uncompress, you will have a folder called "ptc_manikin_lib". Rename this to be simply "Manikins".
The full library includes 53 manikins! That is too many. Your team will not need so many to choose from, and you're not going to want to scrub the layers in all of them. You probably do want to keep both male and female manikins in a range of sizes, but one set of population data should be sufficient. In my case, I'm in the USA, and work in the aerospace sector, so the "NASA-STD-3000" population set was the one I chose to keep. It includes 5th, 50th, and 95th percentile male and female adult manikins. I also kept the 2 children that are provided, for a total of 8 manikins. When adding a Manikin to an assembly, having a list of 8 sizes to choose from is much more reasonable than 53!
The full library also includes a similar set of 6 manikins per National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data, and 4 per the Army's Natick Soldier Systems Center's data. And dozens more from various other country's population studies. Delete them all!
There are also various files you can delete, for various other languages and unnecessary bookkeeping. Keep index.lst, manikin_interchange.asm, & manikin_placeholder_template.asm only, delete all the other files.
Now you have to edit that "index.lst" file, to account for the manikins you've deleted. This file controls what appears in the "Insert Manikin" dialog box. Open it with a text editor, and observe that it has a line for each of the manikin folders. Delete the lines corresponding to all the folders you've deleted.
Speaking of the "Insert Manikin" dialog box... Are you an American? If so, edit your config.pro to include the line "file_dialog_units_class ips". Then the "Insert Manikin" dialog box will show their height and weight in inches and pounds, rather than meters and kilograms. (Unfortunately, it can't show height in "feet & inches", only "inches".) This should be made the company default.
Start by configuring as I just described, so it temporarily works out of a windows folder. This will let you clean up the layers (I'll get to that), and edit the "manikin_interchange.asm" to remove broken links, before you ever load to PDMLink.
Typically, no one ever will load the "manikin_interchange.asm" file; it's just the mechanism by which one manikin can be replaced with another. If you're keeping it in windows, the links to deleted manikins will never be a problem. But if you try to add it to PDMLink, they cause ghost entries to appear, preventing you from checking in. So open it up, and delete the red lines out of the model tree so there are no missing component errors, regenerate, and save.
Also, rather than following step 4 of that procedure, to create the needed PDMLink folder structure using csv files, xml files, and shell commands... you may just want to create them manually. If you're only loading 8 manikins instead of 53, it's not such a burden to manually create the folders, and will probably be less hassle. And don't forget to create the folders and subfolders for Comforts and Postures too. (That published procedure seems to omit the Comforts folders.)
Let's start with the easy one, the "manikin_placeholder_template.asm". This is basically used like a start part; it's copied whenever you insert a manikin with the "Use Placeholder" option (which is usually recommended). It has 23 layers, but only needs 3. There are a few other things you might want to change about it too. Its units conventions are set to MKS; if you typically use another convention (such as Creo Parametric Default units), you should probably change this to match. You also might want to change the datum names to match your usual standards. (I changed "ASM_TOP" to just "TOP", etc.) If you're using PDMLink, and it's not set to receive the "DESCRIPTION" and/or "MODEL_BY" parameters, delete them. (Or at the very least uncheck the "designate" box on them, so you don't get warnings every time you upload.)
Now let's eliminate that confusing junk from the manikins themselves. The idea will be to wind up with only your company standard layers, plus two unique layers, "MANIKIN_DRAG", and "MANIKIN_LINE_OF_SIGHT".
First, we need to establish some rules we can paste in, to establish new layers after we delete the mess of old ones. Create a new empty part (or assy; doesn't matter). Create layers that match the names of your company standard layers for datum planes, coordinate systems, axes, and points. (We will be using your company standard layer for surfaces too, but not yet.) Also create a layer called "MANIKIN_DRAG". Set up rules for each of these as follows:
The "Associative" option for all of these rules except the last one should be checked (on the "Options" menu of the "Rules" tab of the "Layer Properties" dialog), so the rules apply to everything already in the models, not just new items. And FYI, the particulars of that last rule, for MANIKIN_DRAG, aren't important. Intent was to create a do-nothing rule, that will never catch anything. You must have a rule for this layer in order to be able to extend it down the tree to all subcomponents, and the layer must be in all subcomponents for the coordinate system rule to work properly.
The MANIKIN_DRAG layer is special. We're not going to delete it out of the manikins. It collects certain coordinate systems which are used for manikin manipulation, and is shown & hidden automatically when needed; there will be an error warning if it's not there. In order to work properly (and it doesn't out-of-the-box), we want to make sure the coordinate systems that PTC placed on this layer are not also placed on any other layer; otherwise they won't actually be shown when the system prompts you to select one. So that's why the coordinate system rule above has the "AND" statement, so it only layers coordinate systems that aren't already on the MANIKIN_DRAG layer. Problem is, it won't layer any coordinate systems in models that don't have that layer, so we need to make sure they all do, even if it's usually going to be empty. (I.e. "not included" on "MANIKIN_DRAG" doesn't register as positive where there is no "MANIKIN_DRAG")
c01484d022