The Potential of Digital Animation as a Tool for Design Evaluation

The digital animation provides the exploration of virtual expression making it possible to undertand complexities in architectural design. The purpose of this research was to verify user perception of the architectonic project through computerized animation. An experiment was developed to identify the user architectonic perception when watching the project animation compared to the reality of the accomplished kitchen project. Two kinds of digital animation were experimented: a simplified animation (using standard shading and render preview) and a realistic animation (using scanline resource for digital scenes rendering). It was verified that the simplified digital animation presents satisfactory cost-benefit relation in order to obtain design understanding for both, user and designer. Based on this experiment, directives were specified for the creation and aplication of a questionary together with design digital animation in order to verify architectonic program requeriments, for increased design compreehation