Punch! Professional Home Design Suite

by Punch Software

Product Features

• Total home design software package
• Check it all out before you get started
• Pro-level design with easy-to-use wizards
• From foundation to plumbing to electrical systems
• Easily calculate costs in time and money

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000067FK7
• Item model number: 35100
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 7, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,867 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

There's no other software like it! ALL program components work from the same simple interface, so all design tools and 3D capabilities are always at your fingertips. The LiveView window continually previews your work, in real-time 3D, as you draw. Convenient features such as the unique "color ramp" give you thousands of subtle paint color choices, slope tool allows easy design flexibility for walk-out basements and split-level designs. Interior and exterior 2D elevations are available with a single mouse click and the exclusive ClearView tool renders your design with a "glass house" effect so you can see through walls and maximize space. Feature for feature, the easy-yet-powerful tools integrated in Professional Home Design Suite give you virtually unlimited control over every aspect of your home plan.

Ultimate Deck

This feature includes powerful tools to give you complete control to design the perfect deck for your home plan. Multi-level or multi-story decks with 3D photo-realistic textures, stairs, railings, object placement, and color capabilities give you the ability to design exactly the deck you want. Deck Wizards walk you through railing, baluster options, and more.

3D Landscape

When you're ready to landscape, just add your plantings to your existing file. Only Punch! lets you landscape without redrawing your house plan unlike other home design software "suites". You'll see beautiful results rendered in realistic 3D! Professional Home Design Suite gives you the flexibility to create retaining walls and other topographic features that enhance your home design. You can even design a custom sprinkler system for your property!

Foundation Planner

Excavate foundation and retaining walls into your topography. Split-level and walk-out basements are a snap. Includes specialized tools for slabs with support beams, exterior wall thickness, foundation piers, post-tension and more.

Heating, Ventilating & Cooling Planner

Lets you design the ultimate system for comfort and maximum efficiency. Components include custom supply & return air ducts, floor registers, ceiling & wall registers, return air grills, furnace, condensing unit, baseboard heating units and more.

Custom Sprinkler Systems

Ensure your green thumb with a custom sprinkler system! . Define both the radius and arc of your sprinkler with simple click and drag. Design a system for your entire yard and/or specific planting areas quickly and easily. Use the Custom Sprinkler Tool to visualize maximum system coverage.

Plumbing Planner

Includes and extensive library of fixtures including sinks, toilets, tubs, spas, shower stalls, water heater, floor drains, gas & water hose bibs and much more. In addition, many of these objects automatically attach to walls so fixtures move when walls are edited.

Electrical Planner

A comprehensive component library including indoor and outdoor receptacles, provision for 110 or 220 volt, single, 3, 4, or 5-way switches, can & spotlights, TV & phone jacks, smoke detectors, thermostat, ceiling fans, dimmer switches, GFI receptacles and more.

FloorPlan Trace

Simply scan your favorite home plan and it becomes a traceable template you can modify to create your own customized plan

Home Estimator

As you design, Home Estimator compiles building materials and landscape plantings information on the fly, producing a handy report in an editable, printable, exportable spreadsheet format. Just plug in the labor and material costs for your locality and Home Estimator does the rest!

AutoFraming

View a 3D rough-in frame view of your home plan with one mouse click! See complex stairs, roof trusses, headers and more. AutoFraming works with the integrated Home Estimator program to track expenses and keep you on budget.

3D RealModel

Only Punch! software lets you build a professional-looking 3D scale model of your home plan. Our RealModel technology takes your home design and creates the components needed to produce a model...directly from your design file. All of your chosen colors and textures print to your color printer, for you to mount on foamboard, trim and assemble.

Ordinary blueprints can't show you what Punch! Professional Home Design Suite can!

Turn layers on and off for uncluttered viewing, printing and drawing. You can combine as few or as many layers as you wish AND spot potential, costly design conflicts. Only Punch! lets you view your plan YOUR way!

Product Description

12 Programs in one intuitive easy-to-use interface... POWERFUL, PROFESSIONAL TOOLS to help you design all of the critical components of your home including foundations, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, custom windows, custom roofs, and much, much more!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars You'd be better off with a box of crayons, May 29, 2002

By 

"gregcerny" (sunnyvale, ca USA) - See all my reviews

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

The 3d view is very limited, you can walk through but you can't tilt your viewing angle vertically. The objects are very basic and there isn't much of a selection. The "12 powerfull programs in 1" is rediculous. The plumbing "program" is just a few bathroom objects that you can place in your house. The electrical and HVAC are just like the plumbing. Autoframing is useless. If you decide to change something you can't drag a box around everything and update them all at once. Example: i wanted to change my wall hieght, i had to right click on every wall, select "wall properties" from the menu, and then highlight a box and change it. And i had to do that for every wall seperately. The lanscaping feature where it changines the plants to show how they will look in 5 years just scales up some flat images of the plants.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected, December 31, 2002

By A Customer

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

This program is difficult to understand. It is not easy to use. If you make a mistake it is not easy to correct it. I did not like it at all and am taking it back to Office Depot. I should have read other reviews before I got it.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not ready for prime-time, March 15, 2004

By A Customer

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

Very, very limited. Decides arbitrarily to link walls together so that an interior wall becomes an exterior wall, and changing the interior back changes all the walls in the group. No way to break a wall once you've put a window or door in it unless you first remove the window or door. Selection of textures is very, very limited and there is no documented way to import more. Selection of objects the same--the 3d designer does allow new objects to be defined but compared to any kind of real 3-d CAD program, including the freeware version of Intellicad (no longer available alas), it's horribly weak, and no way to import from a real CAD program unless maybe you spring for one of the more expensive versions. No doorknobs. No way to specify where lights are located, at least none that I can find--there are lamp objects but they don't provide light, they just sit there.

It's a cheap program that acts like a cheap program.