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Section Five — Environment Editor

The purpose of the HVE Environment Editor is to provide the physical and visual environmental attributes which may interact with humans and vehicles during the execution of a reconstruction or simulation model. This section of the HVE User's Manual describes how to create and edit these environment models. It also provides an overview of the environment model parameters.

The basic physical/mathematical model of the environment provides the following information:

  • An atmosphere, that may be used for modeling aerodynamic forces on humans and vehicles.
  • Fog, haze or smoke in the atmosphere, that may be used to study visibility attenuation.
  • A sun that is positioned according to the local latitude, longitude and time zone, along with the time and date and angle of the earth-fixed coordinate system.
  • The physical environment gravitational constant and surfaces that may be used to model interaction forces (i.e., tires and human and vehicle exteriors).

General Procedure

To use the Environment Editor, perform the following steps:

  1. Select Environment Mode.
  2. Add the physical environment, either by creating a new one or by selecting an environment from a previous HVE case.
  3. Use the 3-D Editor to create the roads, curbs, sidewalks, trees, buildings and other objects with which the humans and vehicles may interact. These objects also provide an extremely important visual context for accident causation.
  4. Import a scanned photograph of the environment, which may also be used to provide visual context.

Overview of Section Five

This section provides a detailed explanation of the process of creating and editing environments, and also presents a detailed overview of the environment model's physical properties:

Code-verified dialog references for this section are collected in docs/manuals/08-environment.

Next: Chapter 12 — Creating & Editing Environments →