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Punch! Professional Home Design Suite Platinum | 
 enlarge | From: Punch! Software
Category: Software
List Price: $99.99
Buy New: $23.19
You Save: $76.80 (77%)
New (1) Used (4) from $19.99
Rating:  25 reviews
Format: Cd-rom
Platforms: Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 95
Media: CD-ROM
Operating System: Windows ME
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.4
Dimensions (in): 12.4 x 10.4 x 2.9
UPC: 664446301000
EAN: 0664446301000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Software is still shrink wrapped or sealed.
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| Features:
| • | Brand new sealed full retail boxed edition. |
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| Editorial Reviews:
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 1/2 Star Rating March 16, 2006
C. Gray (PA, USA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I really didn't want to give the Punch Professional Home Design Platinum a 1 star rating but that was the lowest rating I could give. I am not a software engineer or an architect but have expereinced a life time of frustration for the $80 spent on the program.
Defines "User Hostile" May 6, 2005
David Tigwell (Houston Texas)
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
Like many other reviewers, I am an engineer, and not an architect. I use and have used many, many CAD programs. Some are better than others. This one ranks up there with the worst.
A few examples: Select visible grid. Select Snap-to-grid. The cursor ought to snap to the grid, right? Guess again.
Need to put in a kitchen counter? Maybe somebody knows how, but I never figured it out. Look in the Help Index? Forget it. It's not there.
The software comes with a bunch of constructs like staircases, cabinets, etc. Want to add one? Try to find an "Insert" tab. There isn't one. The only reason I even found out these things existed was by poking around in the program directory. BTW: they can be added through the File Import tab. That's intuitive.
All the little things like not remembering last used directory paths, etc. are also extremely annoying, but simply too numerous to mention.
I completely understand that complex programs require an investment in time to learn how to use them efficiently. After a couple of days trying to get the hang of this one, it became clear that the effort was simply not going to be worth it.
Save your money. Anything has to have a better (Function)/(Price*Annoyance) ratio than this thing.
Punch! Pro Platinum Home Design Ver. 4.5.1
Non-intuitive software with lots of bugs March 7, 2005
S. Edge (Memphis, Tennessee)
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
I purchased this software online after seeing a commerical and reading numerous reviews. Figured the ones on how bad the product was from people not familiar with software. I'm very software literate having built commerical software for Apple, Microsoft, and others.
This software is not intuitive whatsoever. The help system is terrible. Even attempting to do things like "Undo" doesn't work, or if it does it is impossible to figure out.
The program crashed multiple times trying to render the design. In spending $100 bucks, a complete waste of money, I wouldn't suggest anyone using this product unless they take a class.
I read through the help system but it was poorly constructed, and would give you icons but rarely a clue where to find them.
Save your money.
 Good for conceptual designs December 29, 2004
David L. Nelson (Framingham, MA)
28 out of 29 found this review helpful
I am a physicist/software developer, not an architect, and have experience with Punch Platinum (Punch), Better Homes and Garden Suite 6 (BHG), and DesignWorkshop Lite (DWL).
None of these are architectural design packages -- for that you'd pay big bucks and a lot of learning time. Rather, these are perspective drawing packages. DWL is in a slightly different category being closest to a true 3D modeling application. It is the only one that builds 3d objects from fundamentals, importing house objects from libraries. Hence, it takes more time to get going.
BHG and Punch are great for rapid prototyping, allowing you to construct a semblance of a home in just minutes. Punch has a big advantage in that it uses the popular OpenGL rendering engine. It also has a true 3d CAD capability to build unique objects that can be integrated into the design. Objects can be 'grouped' to form compound onbjects, but this capability is not available for their house objects, like walls and roofs.
BHG claims CAD tools, but they are simply 2D drawing tools -- rather useless as a design tool. I found BHG too limiting to use -- could not do multi-level flooring, etc. Punch, on the other hand seemed to do most of what I wanted.
One caveat for dealing with additions or remodeling: these packages, especially BHG, may not be able to model pre-existing structures accurately enough.
Here's my bottom line:
BHG: useful only as a concept designer for very traditional homes. It's single advantage is easy to use, but that feature is comparable to Punch which adds much more capability.
Punch: has true 3D capability as well as good object design based on OpenGL software. I regret it doesnt carry object design techniques, like grouping, over to the home oriented objects.
DWL is free and perhaps the most sophisticated at 3D design. It is a bit weaker on rapid prototyping and to do anything serious, you may need to buy the upgrade. DWL is cross-platform software, running on both Mac and Windows, and so it suffers from minor oddities in the GUI.
Old, clunky, incomplete August 12, 2004
John Nordin (Minnesota, USA)
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
I wish I'd read these reviews instead of the ones in the computer mags. I manage software development for a living. This program shows many signs of having never been redone since the early 80s. The graphics are crude, the method of specifying dimensions for cabinets utterly fails to use the Windows interface effectively. Most weirdly the `walk through' capability was hair trigger even on the slowest speed setting - tiny movements of the mouse sent the image spinning. Could this be due to my fast CPU - in other words, the program's interface rates aren't calibrated against real clock time, but simply CPU time? Something left over from the 286 days, if true.
And it isn't useful. No sliding window types, for one example. Hard to snap walls to corners. Odd ways of moving components around that - again - don't use modern Windows conventions. My wife wanted to select kitchen cabinet types and was totally unimpressed by the types available. Textures are cartoonish.
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