Product Description Punch! Professional Home Design Platinum Version 8 takes the current No. 1 selling home design product to a new level. Sixteen powerful programs in one, including the new Roofing Wizard, Topo designer, Advanced lighting capabilities, and Deck Wizard. Cabinet Wizard for automatic cabinet design, Custom Texture Builder, PlantFinder sort able database, and PhotoView for importing real world photos to your design. The enhanced user interface with 3D cut away viewing tools, makes millions of design combinations easier than ever before. .com With Punch! Professional Home Design Suite Platinum 8.0 you get the power of professional home design software (Punch! Professional Home Design Suite), plus fully-integrated landscape software (Punch! Master Landscape). This easy-to-use home and landscape design package will have you planning the home of your dreams in minutes. Build the kitchen of your dreams. Make detailed landscaping decisions. Punch! Professional Home Design Suite lets you design and view all of your home's rooms in photo-realistic 3D. Punch!'s PhotoView technology lets you import real-world photos into your home and landscape designs to create a truly realistic image of your home. Fly through your design and see it from all angles. You can import a photo of your own home, add landscaping design or deck design, and then view your work from any angle -- all in realistic, 3D perspective. What's more, the software's LiveView window continually updates your home designs, in real-time and in 3D, as you draw. Meanwhile, 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, allowing you to see through walls to maximize your design space. The powerful 3D graphics engine also lets you create real-time walk or fly-throughs of your designs. Creating wonderful new spaces outside your home is just as easy as creating the interiors. The garden and landscape design tools allow you to create multi-level or multi-story decks with 3D photo-realistic textures, stairs, railings, object placement, and color capabilities. Helpful deck design wizards walk you through railing, baluster options, and more. Choose a basic shape or create one from scratch and watch the program draft a beautiful 3D rendering of your new deck design. Your deck and landscaping designs come to life with photo-realistic 3D -- complete with shadows -- giving you a stunning, true-to-life representation of your home design. Plus, the integrated PlantFinder provides extensive information for a wide variety of plant species including botanical name, soil and moisture requirements, mature height and other facts so you choose exactly what you want for your garden and landscape design. Tap into information for over 2,000 selections of flowers, shrubs, trees, ornamental grasses, ground cover, and more. Other features built into the Home Design Suite are designed to give you incredibly detailed control over your design decisions. Features like Cabinet Wizard for your kitchen designs, as well as modules for plumbing HVAC, electrical wiring, and even your house foundation are included. There's even a Home Estimator module for estimating your construction costs. P.when('A').execute(function(A) { A.on('a:expander:toggle_description:toggle:collapse', function(data) { window.scroll(0, data.expander.$expander[0].offsetTop-100); }); }); From the Manufacturer Punch! Professional Home Design Suite Platinum 8.0 is a special two-for-one package loaded with incredible capabilities. You get all of the features of both industry-acclaimed Punch! Master Landscape and Punch! Professional Home Design Suite ...in one easy-to-use product. Design and view your home design with incredible 3D realism! Our PhotoView technology lets you combine real-world photos with your own designs to create a truly realistic image of your design. You can import a photo of your own home, add landscaping or a deck, then view it from any angle--with realistic, 3D perspective. And our LiveView window continually previews your work, in real-time 3D, as you draw. 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. You can actually see through walls to maximize your design space. And youll be amazed at our powerful 3D graphics engine that lets you create real-time walk or fly-throughs--for a Hollywood-style voyage through your new creation! The choice for total garden and landscape design. Create multi-level or multi-story decks with 3D photo-realistic textures, stairs, railings, object placement, and color capabilities. Deck Wizards walk you through railing, baluster options, and more. Choose a basic shape or create one from scratch and watch the program draft a beautiful 3D rendering of your deck concept. Your deck and landscaping come to life with photo-realistic 3D--complete with shadows--giving you a stunning, true-to-life representation of your design. Our PlantFinder provides extensive information for a wide plant species including botanical name, soil and moisture requirements, mature height, and other facts so you choose exactly what you want. Tap into information for over 2,000 selections of flowers, shrubs, trees, ornamental grasses, ground cover, and more. Features: 3D home exterior design Ultimate Deck Master Landscape 3D Custom Workshop FloorPlan Trace Home Estimator PlantFinder sortable database Breakthrough PhotoView technology ClearView transparent viewer Cabinet Wizard Texture Builder RealModel (patented) HVAC planner Plumbing planner Foundation planner Electrical planner See more
V**N
better instructions needed
Over all this is a good product BUT be prepared for a high learning curve and instructions that need to be updated for the layman. You can not just purchase this software, and POOF design a house. Although the software comes with a basic book, it is not very helpful when you are having an issue with something and can't figure out what you are doing wrong. The manufactures also need to have a full tutorial included with the software, like what is included with any computer game or wordprocessing program. Although the program has help buttons that you can click on for certain things, I find them to be lacking and not on nearly enough topics. There are however websites that are like "support" groups that offer help in bulletin board or email style (for free!) but once again, until you are familiar with the program and what and how to work with it, it can be frustrating. Personally I purchased this with a specific plan in mind, and I still have not been able to complete it as I am learning and stumbling through it.
H**U
Really hard to use
I still can't make anything useful from this software. I'm diving back in soon but there's got to be easier software out there.
S**E
Useful program.
Not for the faint of heart. This is a hard core design program. It will give you what you want once you get the hang of it. It's not real hard to learn, just intense programming. Very professional.
J**G
Not for the faint of heart - but it works !
I think the fancy box makes you think it's a snap drawing 3d renditions. If You've never used CAD software before, you may become frustrated. You have to have a firm grasp of 3 dimensional design to maneuver around it.I'm still learning to use it but have done headway. The mannual is almost of no use. I tend to use the help menu instead. You need a lot of trial and error to learn its different features. When in doubt, i would save my working file into another name just to test it out.It's a good program for 3d visualization. FOr doing CAD prints for submission to your building department, it's not.If you can hurdle the learning curve without pulling your hair out, go for it.
N**D
Frustrating time waster
AVOID THIS S/W !!!!I spent several hours creating drawings only to open the files to see that my drawing is gone!! Calling Punch's Technical Support was useless. I was told that maybe I have some other program running in the background that might be causing the problem. So now what do I do? I later received an email from Punch's Technical Support suggesting ways to try to recover my work which were unsuccessful. No explanation from Punch of why this occurs.
D**N
Really bad interface
1. If you use it on a system with a reasonably fast graphics card, as soon as you try to pan in the 3D view it will spin so fast you can't even see what's going on, it's a lot like drinking tequila - everything is just a spinning blur. If you have a very fast graphics card (e.g. HD6950) then even on the slowest speed they offer, precise panning is impossible. Not just difficult, you simply can't do it because things spin so fast. Even setting their pan control to the slowest setting and using a gaming mouse with speed controls set to the slowest setting, I cannot pan with any sort of precision. I have to keep nudging the view back and forth until I get lucky and the spot I want is sort of close to where I wanted it.2. Forget about doing any sort of easy walk through/fly through viewing in 3D. As others have pointed out, you can't significantly adjust the views from the 3 preset view types. Your choices are 'satellite' view (directly overhead), helicopter view (slightly elevated) or eye level view. Again because of the antiquated interface if you have a reasonably fast system (E8400 in this case) you can't control the elevation changes in the satellite view. You right click to toggle the zooming in or out, and with a fast graphics card and CPU, it zooms in/out so fast that you can't really control it. You have to keep zooming in and out until you get reasonably close to where you wanted it to be. Once there, you cannot change the viewpoint in any sort of logical/rational manner.3. Did I mention the interface is old? I mean like early 1990's old, it looks like the old Borland graphics interface returned in zombie form. If you're expecting a modern 3D interface like you'd find on Google SketchUp (or pretty much any other 3D design program for that matter) you're in for a disappointment. Apparently Punch! took that "Shop smart... shop S-Mart" thing literally.4. Not very useful tech support. They outsource the tech support to a third party. Want to know if it's compatible with Windows 7? Well the help topic on the Punch site links to a different website where they put you back at the top of the website while blasting dozens of ads for all sorts of other packages at you. You have to do the whole look up of "Punch Home Design Platinum" all over again because it doesn't remember you were looking at that product when it sends you to the new website.5. I've had this package since Dec of '08. Why write a review now? Because I just re-installed Windows and I tried to re-install the Home Design Platinum package and it has reminded me how much I despised using it. It won't accept my registration for some reason. It doesn't say why it's not accepting it, it just does nothing at all when I click on 'Register'. Unlike normal applications with actual user interfaces I can't go in to Help -> About and click on a register link from there while I have their tech support site open in a browser window. No, none of that user friendly silliness for Punch! The only time it allows you to enter a registration key is when it starts up, and of course it starts up full screen so you have to alt-tab or use the task bar to bring up a browser window in order to view their tech support site. Once there all it has to say on the subject is "Just click on the register button". Gee, I never thought of that! Are you sure I shouldn't have pushed the "Catch Fire" button after I typed in the registration number?Somewhere between the pathetic user interface of Punch Home Platinum and the constant, annoying money grubbing from Chief Architect lies a really good home design package. I'd recommend a different starting point to look for it though 'cause you can't get there from this package. If I knew a better one, I'd suggest it but those are the two I have the most experience with and I'd have a hard time recommending either.
Trustpilot
3 weeks ago
2 months ago
