Customer Reviews

Punch! Professional Home Design

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I was using Broderbund's Total 3D Home to design a new home and wanted to try something more powerful. I purchased the Punch! product and am very disappointed. This product may be okay for drawing an existing home or for finalizing a plan you've already developed. But it is very difficult to use if you are in the early stages and want to move rooms around, re-size rooms, change exterior wall shapes etc.

Now that I've tried Punch, I'm going back to Broderbund. It is a far easier package to use.

As a hobby, I design a lot of houses. I have been using 3D Home Architect 3.0 and wanted to try Professional Home design to step up. I'm not impressed.

What the program offers: 1)complete integration and compatibility of program functions, 2) 3D rendered walkthroughs, 3) the ability to build custom furniture models, 4) the ability to build a physical scale model of the design

Those are really neat sounding features, but they do not make up for the software's faults.

For one, the floor plan design tools are somewhat counter-intuitive. I found that I couldn't break a wall in two, and the auto dimensions were not helpful in determining the locations of any interior walls. It is impossible to copy and paste doors and windows. Unlike 3D Home Architect, most objects do not recognize when they are against a wall.

Particularly annoying was kitchen design. This thing behaves more like modified rendering software than a home designer. When you start placing cabinets, the selection looks neat already rendered, but I could not tell if they had doors or drawers! The selection of cabinets that I could identify was woefully inadequate, and when placed the sizes were a little off.

After trying to design a kitchen I didn't even try the other features. If home design software can't get a kitchen right it's otherwise useless!

So I say if you want to build a model of your house, get the cheaper 3D Home Architect 3.0, print out a floorplan, and get a modeling kit. Believe me, you'll still save time over using Professional Home Design.

I realized that this was not the best tool for designing a house after 5 minutes of use. I originally hoped that once the general design (using Visio) was done I could use this software's advanced features (framing, 3D walkthroughs, modeling, etc.) to check it out. No luck. I guess it would work for simple plans but I found it very difficult (if not impossible) to use for complex multi-level plans. The 3D walkthrough is jerky and hard to use (even on a 500 Mhz P III).

While the software shows some promise, it is not there yet. Last but not least, it GPFed (Windows 98) during a 3D walkthrough causing me to lose an hour's work (I know, I should save my work more often).

I took a chance on buying this, and now I'm happy I did. But I think I'm happy because of my particular needs for this program. I'm not trying to build a house from scratch. I'm simply trying to create a "database" of my new house. Once I created the house, inside and out, I now have something on which I can experiment with new interior wall configurations, furniture/bar arrangements, and landscaping.

Now perhaps there are other programs (I have tried Broderbund, but was unsatisfied) that give you a better user interface. But Punch! gives you one thing that I found extremely useful, and is worth the money in and of itself. It's extremely well-thought-out object-oriented design allows you to (as the ad says) design your own furniture. This is an understatement. What it does is let you build your own components, including furniture and objects such as half-walls and distinctive doors. Though not documented, you can even create your own textures such as wood grains and sidings (not through the program itself, but via bitmap images you create with other software). The most useful thing for me is the ability to create my vast collection of woodworking tools, so that I can arrange them in my shop, and via its fly-through capability, walk thru the passages among the tools to see if there's enough clearance to do all the things I have to do in there.

It has several bugs (that's why I don't give it a 5), but it is very stable (at least on my Windows 2000). The bugs are minor, and you quickly learn how to avoid them. All-in-all this is one of the best pieces of software I have ever bought. The only thing I caution is that you decide on what your needs are. Don't buy this expecting to build your own house (I can't imagine any piece of software under $1000 you should trust for those purposes). But for home renovation and interior design, this is the best you can do.

I have been working with Punch Pro now for over a year and as with any program, flaws exist. For 10 years or more I have worked with Expert Homes, 3D Home Architect, Total 3D, and others and until I found Punch! I had been unsuccessful in completing a home design from scratch. Finally, I created my home. I started out with Punch! 5 in 1, built my home, and have upgraded ever since, to Punch! Super, and then to Punch! Pro.

The 3D rendering in Punch is the most realistic, non-cartoonish, and fastest renderings out of all the programs I've tried. In addition to it's excellent rendering qualities, it has offered me by far the most useable tools for creativity related to flooring, roofing, wall styles, doors and windows, decks, landscaping, furniture, and the like. I'm able to move walls, split walls, build up, build down, and create any type of roof I so desire. The Esitmator calculates essential lumber and main inserts for the home design, and allows for additional inputs of criteria necessary for actual building and creating floor plans. What I especially enjoy the most is the furniture workshop where I can easily alter or create, design, and decorate my furniture to an exact fit suitable to my own needs.

Learning the program, as with any other, requires patience and persistance and in the end the results are worth waiting for. I would encourage those who have not yet tried it to thoroughly learn of it's capabilities, go to the support websites to learn of enticing and exciting new ideas for creativity and work-arounds, and be patient and persistant before giving up on the Punch Program. No program is without flaws! I plan to continue with Punch and in addition try others for comparison. I have not yet found anything better and more cost effective than Punch!

After reading several of the reviews of this product, I had to wonder if they received the same product that I did. I have had none of the claimed problems that are mentioned. Walls stop when you want them to (read the instructions) and I created the home I am moving into with a few hours of paying attention to detail and trial and error with the features. I recreated a home that already exists from the dimensions taken from the home. I was amazed at how easy it is to work this program. I have tried to use CAD programs in the past and this is a piece of cake compared to them. I like it so much I am upgrading to the Platinum version for more features. The only reason I gave it 4 stars vs 5 is because I am upgrading.
I have not used the Broderbund program but I don't think anyone with a little computer skill will be disappointed.
Buy it...you'll like it.

I had been using Broderbund Home Architect 2.0 and finally decided to upgrade. The promises of the Punch home design were totally empty. Many, many features I did not like! Drawing walls was not intuitive... I couldn't figure out how to stop drawing! If my plan went off the screen, I couldn't stop the wall to move the screen and then start back up without walls goings off to never-never-land. I started with an old design of known size and found the "area"(i.e. square footage) to be 30% off/under. A major flaw! Then there is the moving walls. I'd try to move an entire wall up or down, but just one corner would move... pulling the adjacent wall corner in at a strange angle. It was impossible to get the corners back to 90 degrees. I found the 3D furniture design tediously impossible to work with. And I did not like the measuring setup. The tape was far too big and once I had measured the room dimensions, the measurements didn't stay... so I had to move the wall a few inches and measure... and move a few inches and measure... I returned it for a full refund and bought the Broderbund 4.0. It has a few flaws too, but at least its workable.

As someone in the professional contractor's field, I thought that this piece of software might be useful, to create all the various layouts of a house, landscape it, furnish it, and see it all in glorious color 3D. The Punch Home Design Professional was supposed to let the lay customer (i.e. non-architects who have no time to learn expensive CAD programs) to do all this and more. Unfortunately, because the program is designed to be "simple," it is very limited. If you try to do something remotely different (such as changing the height of power outlets, or adding home theater wiring), then you're completely out of luck. And if it's something a little more complex, don't even think about it.

Furthermore, the program is not as simple as it wants to be either. It tries to offer lots of options. Unfortunately, the options are not very useful. Then, there are other quibbles, such as the 3D view controls being completely out of whack. Running on a relatively powerful computer, the scroll is so fast that there is virtually no way to control anything.

All in all, this is a great concept, and maybe in a few revisions, they'll get it right. But for now, don't waste your time or money.

I like many have run though the halls of Amazon reading reviews on software. First I bought Siera Home Arch and that software was neat but it was very slow, required too much memory and had countless quirks (I am being kind) that wasted so much of my time trying to work around. But alas, it did not have what I needed which was split level designs. So I went back to the market and got Punch Professional and let me tell you, it is great. It works differently than Siera, but it does 1000 times more stuff with almost no quirks. I can really design anything in it with the quality of a professional. I think these is the best I have seen and would highly recommend it.

I use 3-d CAD software in work so I have had some experience in this type of software. I have used a older version of the 3-d broderbund software and found it somewhat intuitive but the graphics were disappointing. I was ready to get a newer version figuring the graphics would be better when I came across this software.
We are modifying an older home and I was looking to get a feel for the flow of the house before we moved some walls and get a visual feel for what the rooms are going to look like. This software did the trick. I havn't opened the book and have most of the floorplan done with modifications we were looking for(9 room house 2200 SF = 5 hours, no training, all windows, doors, furniture etc. havn't done the roof nor kitchen yet). The elevation scale was a bit difficult to understand and the auto-wall dimensioning had a lot to be desired. Although the graphics are good in detail they are very slow in rendering.
I agree there are shortcommings to this program and if I designed houses for a living or was designing from scratch, this might not be the tool to use (I only have experience with one other program so I am NOT an expert). From a relative ease of use and a method for visualizing room size, house flow, lighting etc, it works great. I am looking forward to finishing the rest of the house.
I am running Win98 2nd edition on a P3 500 256 MBram 32Meg diamond video card and have not had any system preformance nor graphics rendering problems.

Like any other review, use it with a grain of salt. I needed Ideas without a $5000 price tag. Structural support of your design must be considered with any interior changes.