Punch! Professional Home Design Suite Platinum

by Punch Software

Product Features

• •Comprehensive features
• Ability to create sophisticated designs •
• Prints electrical and plumbing blueprints

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005OUHQ
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 1, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,987 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Professional Home Design Platinum integrates 16 professional tools, including Cabinet Wizard for automatic cabinet design, Custom Texture Builder, the PlantFinder sortable database, and PhotoView for importing photos into your design. Other new tools for topographic excavation, 3-D cutaway elevations, and more are also included, giving you millions of design combinations.

Use 3D Home Exterior Design to view your home in thousands of subtle paint color choices, or design walk-out basements and split-level designs with the slope tool. The ClearView tool renders your design with a glass-house effect, giving you a wire-frame perspective of your topography without your landscape plantings. A user-definable database helps you find the right plantings for your planting zone based on your search criteria. More than 2,000 selections of flowers, shrubs, trees, ornamental grasses, ground cover, and more are featured.

Design the perfect deck for your home plan with Ultimate Deck. Multilevel or multistory decks with 3-D photorealistic textures, stairs, railings, object placement, and color capabilities give you the ability to design exactly the deck you want. Deck Wizards walk you through railings, baluster options, and more. And make sure everything is planned to perfection with tools for planning foundation, HVAC, electrical, and plumbing. Even create custom cabinet designs with just a few simple mouse clicks with Cabinet Wizard.

Product Description

Punch! Professional Home Design Suite Platinum comes with flexible, robust tools for designing a home and viewing it in 3D. You can print plumbing and electrical blueprints or add special details like wainscoting. There's also a LiveView feature that updates your design in real time.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

172 of 178 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than Broderbund's Home Design Package, June 18, 2002

By 

"bkwall" (Hallandale Beach, Fl United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Punch! Professional Home Design Suite Platinum (CD-ROM)

I bought both the Punch Pro Platinum and the Broderbund Home Design Suite Deluxe 4.0

Ok, if you are a computard than neither program is for you. If you want features then Punch beats Broderbund Hands Down.

IF you want ease of use, then Buy some paper a ruler and a pencil.

Now I am a software developer, but I know nothing about House design.

I spent 8 hours with Broderbund Deluxe 4.0....end result was that I kept running into one limitation after another. Very weak package.

I spent 4 hours with Punch and I had my entire house built. Another eight hours later and I had four different variations on the additions, on roof layouts even funriture.

Frankly, I want to mail the Broderbund software back to them with a pile of dog doo in the box. Punch on the other hand, while it is a little wierd to get used to at first with its click, double click, two click, right click scheme, once you get used to it is a breeze.

Caveat - I did not read the manual or go through the tutorial on either package, so ease of use has to be Punch. On top of that its got a slew of features and had no problems installing on win XP (something that the Broderbund ...could not do...it kept creating read only directories in the install procedure and then tried to write to them and couldn't....imagine that.)

64 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Better than most...but still, March 18, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Punch! Professional Home Design Suite Platinum (CD-ROM)

I've been using Punch software for a few years now. For most simple applications, it seems to do what I need. It's when you get to the complicated stuff that it breaks down on you. A couple of specific things that would make their software much better:

1. More detail in properties menus. They tend to stick to standard stuff and you find yourself including things into our design that have absolutley nothing to do with what you really want. But its' the only design feature they have that comes close to what you want.

2. They have a ruler on the side of the screen. How about one across the top also. You always have to guess where you are horizontally.

3. I wanted to design a retaining wall for a hill behind my house. The landscape feature in Punch assumes the wall will be a skirt around the house and will not let you convert it to an outside wall without adding an extra segment to it. What's tha all about? Most retaining walls are single segment.

4. The 3D viewer should be expandable to full screen.

5. In the properties pane, particulalry for wall segments, you should be able to include length and angle. That would take the guess work out of trying to measure using the auto dimension or the ruler. I've wasted a lot of time on this one.

all for now.

80 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Is this as good as it gets?, July 15, 2002

By 

David Kohn (Burlingame, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Punch! Professional Home Design Suite Platinum (CD-ROM)

From reading a number of reviews of various home design products, it looked like Punch Pro was the best of the lot. This may be so, but it is more indicative of the poor state of the home design software market.

The good:
- Nice, intuitive interface
- Relatively easy to get started
- 3D view is impressive, at first (see the bad)

The bad:
- 3D view is slow & hard to navigate. Helicopter view is somewhat better, but still not very user-friendly. Ability to navigate with cursor keys instead of mouse would help
- Buggy. I crashed several times, and lost significant work (save early, save often)
- Some features are very limited. You cannot rotate a shower 90 degrees. You cannot resize sinks and other bathroom equipment
- Overkill. Some features like plumbing and electricity might be attractive to some, but I would rather have had more focus on the basics
- CPU intensive. I have a powerful PC, but changing views & navigating can try your patience

The ugly:
- For the price [I paid] I expected a more polished, easier to use piece of software