Customer Reviews

Punch! Home Design Architectural Series 18 [Old Version]

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I have used three Punch products in the past 3 years: Suite, Platinum, and AS18. They all offer similar user interfaces, although as you pay more money, you get more features. In fact, the feature list in AS18 is too large to list here. While some of the newer features work (DXF and VRML export), I was unable to figure out why anyone would want to use them. The diversity of the features (for example, "showers" can be found both in the "objects" [or "furniture"] section, and in the "plumbing" section) will strike you either as confusing, or as providing rich alternatives, depending on how you view these things.

Punch offers free updates from their web site, but if history is any indicator, you can only expect one update per product. Older products, such as Suite and Platinum, are likely to remain exactly as they are, with no further enhancements or bug fixes. I believe that an AS18 upgrade is now available for download from Punch.

Program performance ranges from intolerably slow to quite acceptable, but not in a way that is easy to fathom. Calculations that took my old Dell 933 MHz Pentium system 20 seconds, take about 11 seconds on my new AMD 1.8 MHz Athalon, but for a different kind of calculation, the numbers are 4 and 40. Yes, that's right: the newer, faster machine is 10 times slower than the older machine. When I switched video boards on the newer machine (from an ATI 8500 Radeon to an nVidia 4200 card), this number dropped to below a second, an improvement of a factor of 50 or so. Thus, predicting program performance can be difficult, since simply getting new hardware is not a panacea. Punch tech support provided essentially no help in this area. Note that 3D values are recomputed at times when they need not be, which can be especially frustrating if you have a slower system, since long (20 second) delays can occur.

Punch has designed the software so that there are times when the blueprint is repositioned without your permission. This can lead to your having to pan back to the place you were working originally, which can be pretty annoying. Why they think that they should move the diagram when you did not ask them to is beyond me.

Some features only work well when using a mouse: if you use a graphics tablet, you may be further annoyed. The zoom feature is particulary awkward to use with a tablet.

The main difference between the older Suite and Platinum products and the AS18 product is the addition of "layers". You can inspect and work on any of the layers (including the floor plan, electrical, plumbing, roof, etc) separately, while seeing the other layers as needed. This is a great improvement over the older software.

The program is feature laden, and you can actually design a house with it, but I found it to be pretty annoying at times. On the other hand, I know of no other software in this price range that offers anywhere near the features that this package does.

Annoyances not already mentioned included the following:

The hourglass cursor is rarely used when program delays occur, resulting in user confusion and erroneous multiple clicks;

Some functions appear as active menu items but in fact cannot be used at all;

Even when you click on an object, and the context menu appears, the object may not be fully selected, and operations on that object may fail without warning or explanation;

Plumbing showerheads cannot be moved to arbitrary shower walls;

36"x36" showers will not fit on a 38" wall;

Invoking some tools results in no visible change to the screen, because the tool has performed an activity at a location that the user is not currently able to see;

The program always asks you whether you want to save your design, even when you have made no changes, and even when the design is empty;

The program does not remember printing preferences at all;

Some standard objects (such as queen sized beds) are not the

correct size;

Some objects cannot be easily manipulated because they are hidden "behind" other objects, and there are no facilities for moving objects to the front or back;

Data from designs made in older versions of Punch! software can be read in newer versions, but some data can be lost without warning.

Punch! AS 18 gets a C+ grade at best. It's fine for drawing up a house to "walk though" to get a feel for what it will look like, but it falls frustratingly a bit short of providing the tools needed to design real construction drawings that you could give to a contractor or submit for permits.

I'm designing a two bedroom apartment over a garage, and I need to submit drawings to my city for permits. The last design I submitted to the city for permits was a garage that I designed using pencil and paper four years ago. I'm an engineer and I'm used to drafting in this fashion. However, it was painful when I had to make a change to a window or a door, erasing and re-drawing all the wall studs and everything. So, being the 21st Century, I figured that there has got to be some architectural software design program out there that a design/builder could use to draft up drawings to submit to the city for permits without having to manually draw wall studs (like AutoCAD and other general CAD programs).

I searched high and low and found that you could spend $1,000 or more for a true architectural design program like Chief Architect or ArchiCAD, and everything cheaper seemed to fall into the consumer floor plan design category of not being able to produce real construction drawings. Since I draw up buildings for permits about once every four or five years, I didn't want to spend $1,000 for a program. I thought Punch! AS 18 would be just the ticket. It has a framing utility for automatically framing walls, floors and roofs, and it has an elevation editor.

The frustrating part of this software is that on the surface it appears to provide the features needed to design construction documents. It's only when you put the software to work that you realize its deficiencies. For instance, the software has a framing tool for adding wall, floor and roof framing. It provides very "pretty" 3D views of the framing. But, when you decide to print a framing section, you find that you cannot print the section to scale. It also doesn't insert any dimensions or allow you to manually insert dimensions or text. Your typical contractor isn't going to pull out a scale to find that your header is 2 @ 2 x 12, and the city wants to see this information. So, you can sort-of work around this deficiency by saving the "image" as a BMP file, editing it in an image editing program like PaintShop Pro to print at the correct scale and add the required text. The question that begs itself is why Punch! didn't program the software to automatically display dimensions and text in the framing editor? It already has all the information in the design for header sizes, height, width etc. It also doesn't allow for edits to the rafters or studs. One of the rafters was displayed with a large spacing of about 25" on my design, while all the other rafters were spaced at 16" o.c. It doesn't allow you to edit this at all, and again, you have to edit the BMP file in a drawing program to try to get it right.

This is only one of the deficiencies. The DXF export utility will export every floor on top of itself. So, when you open the file in a CAD program, you see a huge mish-mash of dimensions and floors on top of itself. The program really didn't want to draw a basement, and I had to do all sorts of work arounds to show one. At one point I had a 3' deep foundation showing up at 6' high in the air, and it took me hours of editing to get the foundation to display correctly. As with other reviewers, I had the problem of objects protruding through walls, and I had to constantly view the design in 3D to be sure everything was aligned and not penetrating another solid body.

If all you want to do is see what your house design will look like after it's built by using the 3D walk through and fly around features, this product should work fine for you. However, it seems like there are plenty of lower priced competitors (3D Home Architect, FloorPlan 3D, etc.) that will do the same thing. If you want to draw construction documents, look elsewhere or draw it up by hand. While you may be able to monkey around with this program to get what you need eventually, either by editing in another program or editing with a pencil after printing, it's a frustrating experience when you know that other software out there will do what you need.

This program was well advertised and looked unbelievable on their website. I've used previous Punch Programs as well as Home Architect 3.0, 4.0 and the bizarre 5.0 which isn't really an upgrade. 4.0 has a great interface that is very intuitive, but it just didn't have enough stuff. I spent 2 full weekends trying to work with AS 18 and am thoroughly disgusted. It would be great if you just want to design a box. I gave up when I found dormer roofs and other roofs going through walls. Any use of varying pitch roofs causes all kinds of problems with the dormers. You also have no flexiblity with the fancy trapezoid or triangle windows in terms of changing any one dimension. If you really want to design creatively, don't get this thing. I suggest you go to the Chiefarchitect.com website and learn about why 5.0 is not really an upgrade. They also offer a real upgrade although it is somewhat expensive. I'm gonna try it because I'm tired of cheap low-wattage programs. I guess you get what you pay for.

My advice is to avoid this product. The manual is unclear and just plain inaccurate in places. Exact placement and manipulation of walls and groups of walls is very difficult and tedious. Many times I found myself having to delete several items and walls in order to change a specific wall. It would be extremely helpful if a wall could be locked in position with a menu toggle. Creating walls for vaulted ceilings was extremely frustrating. There is no automatic way to have a group of walls be the same maximum height and meet correctly with vaulted ceilings. This makes roofing design a painful process also.

The 3d views are graphically very good, but the controls for manipulating them are inadequate. It is extremely difficult to do a walk thru from the 3d window. The only way I found to do a controlled walk thru was by using the viewpoint tool in the 2d window. This causes you to do a lot of scrolling and wastes desktop space the 3d view could be using so you end up with less of a perspective than you should have. I have also run into strange glitches with the 3d view that would cause windows and doors to become solid walls again, despite still showing up on the 2d plan. Some times closing the program and restarting would fix the problem and other times I would have to discard the plan and revert back to an earlier save. This is very annoying and time wasting.

My biggest annoyance by far though is that there is no kind of feasibility checking in the program. With a consumer level product some kind of check to evaluate your plan should be present. Something to tell you that your floor needs support at a certain point or it will fall or the concrete pad you are pouring needs reinforcement at specific places. I know many other home design programs have some form of checking in them. It seems Punch software has no checking of any kind. This would be valuable to avoid many simple mistakes and to make the estimator tool much more accurate. If necessary elements are left out because you did not know they were needed, how is the program going to estimate the amount of materials needed with any kind of accuracy?

This program actually seems to be geared to a professional contractor or architect with knowledge of good building practices, but I'm guessing it would be inadequate for them in many other ways. There is not nearly enough help for the amateur designers who only want to tinker with their own house or put a dream home down on paper.

I did a lot of web based research on this product and others before buying Punch! A/S18. There were a number of negative reviews from people who seemed to want a something that would give instant results or complained about system crashes. I installed the product, and then installed the latest update patch from the Punch! website before actually using the product. I have about 20 hours use on this product installed on a Dell PC (Dimension 8250 2.4Ghz, 512k memory, and ATI Radeon 9700 XT series video card.) It runs very fast and I have had no crashes.

This software requires a learning curve to become comfortable and proficient. Do not expect instant gratification. If you want that, buy the $30 - $50 packages that allow no freedom of design.

Rather than telling you what it does (you can read that on their website) I think I should tell you what to expect. First, I was frustrated when I tried to jump right in. Then I kicked back, opened the printed manual and read through it with the software open to follow along. The included video examples are great. I made good use of them.

There are some stumbling blocks, but there are work arounds for all obstacles I ran into. Example: I wanted to have the support posts show in the basement in 3d fly through mode. There is nowhere to choose them from a menu. But, if you go to the Punch! 3D Workshop (a really cool program) in THREE clicks I had drawn a column, then saved it to my floorplan.

There are textures for all the concrete, brick, stucco, wood, paint colors, etc needed to textureize or color your floors, walls and ceilings. More complex items like staircases are chosen from a menu and sizeable. The staircase tool will put stairs wherever you drag your mouse, so you can make some wild staircases. Walls are just point and click. Dimensions can be added where they do not appear automatically if you need them.

When adding things like doors, you can choose the style, size, and hinge side and swing. Just drag and drop to the floorplan. Same goes with windows, archways, etc. There are many premade objects like cabinets, dishwashers, range, TV's, furniture, furnace, A/C, etc to drag and drop onto the plan. Any object you can add to your plan is customizable in the 3D workshop. There is also a user website (www.punch-alternatives.com) that has many 3D objects you can add, from autos, to customized cabinets, etc all made and contributed by Punch! purchasers.

Overall, I rate the product very high, especially for the money. Its abilities put it head and sholders above the $60 products. You need a little patience to get started, and then you will just fly through the construction process. You are only limited by the amount of detail you are willing to add.

One last thing, when I called Tech Support to find out how to cap a half height wall, they actually answered the phone. No menu, no waiting. And they talked me right through the problems I had. Now I keep the included PDF manual open when I'm working to do searches on topics I need to learn. It makes things so much easier. So take your time and enjoy!

Chef Peta

I was looking for an inexpensive and powerful Architectual program and now I found it. My profession is a Senior Mechanical Engineer and I have used 2D & 3D mechanical CAD programs for the last 15 years. I was truely amazed when a friend showed me a house he designed using this product. I saw a product like this 15 years ago running on a main frame computer and hoped that one day I could run a program like that on a PC. Well that day is here. I started drawing a simple rectangular house with three floors and a hip roof in five minutes. I then drew up my complicated house with a full kitchen addition including cabinets, furniture and landscaping in less then 40 hours. You do not need to be a CAD Professional to take advantage of this full featured program. Just take your time and have fun with it.

Punch AS 18 is very stable, especially for the wide set of features and capabilities it provides. It has never crashed for me using Windows XP. This indicates a very professional development team rather than a collection of disparate packages cobbled together in one box.

I liked its ease of use a lot. After a few hours of modifying some samples and then doing a few simple plans from scratch, I feel very capable of using all the features I need. A few years ago I tried HomeDesigner. It was painfully difficult to use and it had only a small subset of Punch 18's features. I finally I gave up using it. Every 3D CAD program has unique ways to place and draw objects, rotate, pan, zoom, scale, view, and navigate and so on in the 3D universe. Punch is definitely one of the easiest I've used.

3D LiveView is immensely helpful in showing a perspective view of the 2D plan you are working. You can navigate in two ways. WalkThrough is generally better for viewing inside the house and FlyAround better for outside.

WalkThrough is at a constant (but adjustable) height where you move forward or backwards and can rotate (pan) to any angle. It's like walking through the design at eyeball level. The camera is always in a horizontal direction. Unfortunately this does not allow you to look up at the ceiling. But you can select a wide angle that shows some of the ceiling.

FlyAround is like a view from a helicopter. You orbit a fixed point at variable altitudes and distances from the center point. FlyAround always aims exactly at the center of the orbit. It's shown on the 2D plan and can easily be moved. You are always looking downward from the helicopter. Unfortunately, you cannot look vertically down because the max downward angle seems to be only 30 degrees below horizontal, an unnecessary restriction.

LiveView has 2 ways to render the picture. I especially like ClearView, which is a 3D B&W drawing that allows the transparency of walls and other objects to range from almost clear to fully opaque. Sometimes it's very handy to see what's on the other side of a wall of the room you're working in. ClearView rendering speed is very fast. ColorView is a little slower, with 4 quality (detail) settings and 3 shadow settings (off, low and high).

LiveView is displayed its own window, which makes it easy to move and resize the 3D view as you work with the 2D plan. This feature is certainly more flexible and much more practical than forcing it into one of 4 corners, or such similar limitations, that some other 3D CADs impose... Every feature they claim they have, they actually do provide, and in a consistent and integrated user interface that all work well together.

There are a few minor glitches. The limitations of view angles mentioned above should be relaxed. WalkThrough is tricky in that it is too easy to move forward/backward when you only want to pan (rotate). It's too easy to accidentally pop through a wall when you only want to look around the room. This could easily fixed with a shift key or such that would lock one movement direction and allow the other.

2D zoom and pan is inconvenient in that you must use the mouse (no keyboard commands for zoom) and it seems to get out of control -- often way too fast. Visio's zoom is the easiest I've ever encountered: Ctl-Shift keys plus mouse buttons do all pans and zooms instantly and easily, with fine control (every 2D CAD should use it!). Similarly, more of the toolbar selections should have keyboard commands.

There are 20 provided floor plans that go from simple to complex designs. These are excellent to play around with and learn what's possible. But none of them have textures or objects! The walls, floors, roofs, landscapes, are bare, no furniture, fixtures or plumbing, totally devoid of human habitation. What a lost opportunity to exhibit many of Punch's really great features.

The most serious deficiency is getting wall to properly intersect with the roof. Punch provides 6 roof types, plus some very useful free-hand roof designing tools. It is incredibly easy to add roofs to complex floor plans. But you are compelled to MANUALLY calculate the heights of all points on each wall where it intersects the roof (by using trig, or a drawing on a paper grid).

While it is hard to describe this problem in words, I'll try a simple example. You have a large main area and a smaller attached room to the side. What does the roof look like for this L-shaped plan? One roof cannot cover the whole thing. With Punch it is *easy* to select and place a suitable roof design over the two areas. Here's the problem: the common wall of the large area attached the small area will extend up to the two roofs. The wall has a complex shape.

Fortunately, Punch has this shape among its wall selections. But YOU must specify the elevations and lengths of the oddly shaped wall. If you make them too large, the wall sticks up above the roof. Too small and there is a gap under the roof. Big birds can fly through it. Some of the sample plans show this problem (P018). Ironically, LiveView must perform these calculations in order to render a 3D view. Punch desperately needs the command: Extent Walls Vertically to Roof.

All in all, Punch-bang AS 18 is a fine piece of software, lots of features, easy to use and with minor nits.

I am designing a new home and I must say this software is the best I've used! It has never crashed on me, and I love the user interface. It has layers which appear as tabs, for viewing and working on different aspects of the plan, such as the main floor plan, the electrical plan, plumbing plan, landscaping, decking, roofing, foundation, and hvac. You can choose to view and print these layers in combination, or separately, which lets you construct a full set of plans.

The 3D is very realistic, and it includes a huge library of textures (building materials such as brick, tile, wallpaper,etc.) and objects such as lighting, furniture, etc. The program can do shadows and a special final-rendering which looks like a photograph - really! It has a cabinet wizard, a custom furniture designer, a texture editor, and tons of other cool features.

One of the really nice features is the 3D walk-through and fly-around - it's like a video game in that it allows you to literally walk-through your home design and look out the windows, ascend the elevation to go up stairs, it's actually fun to use!

I recommend this product.

A couple of years ago I bought home design software from Punch software and gave up on it after a few days of trying to figure out how to use it. (And I'm very technical and generally good with new software). I would not recommend this software unless you really have the time to spend figuring it out.

Google recently released a FREE home design software. Much like other Google products, this one is very easy to use - although not as powerful as one you might purchase. Before buying, I strongly recommend you check out Google's offering. Visit sketchup.google.com to take a look.

Fractions of an inch are not available in any of Punch software packages.
So if you are remodeling or designing a kitchen where 1/2 of an inch is critical, keep that in mind.