They Called It "Professional" for a Reason!
Written: Jun 26 '02 (Updated Jun 26 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: powerful, versatile
Cons: unfriendly, poor help and unhelpful tutorials
The Bottom Line: If you already know how to design a house, this is indispensable. Look elsewhere if you need help with basic concepts
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| scmrak's Full Review: Punch! Professional Home Design Suite (30100) for ... |
I grew up in a house my dad designed and built, including a phase or two of remodeling while I was old enough to help out. Sitting at Dad's knee and standing at his elbow was an education in a broad spectrum of building skills: plumbing, electrical work, framing and finish carpentry to name a few. I may not know diddly about HVAC and I can't float cement to save my life, but I know which end of a hammer is which, can read a blueprint, and can do just about anything necessary to put a roof over my head. So when we decided to design our own home (in the mountains of Colorado) I had no great fear of the process. After all, I've already owned three houses (one ninety years old and the other two slapped together out of matchsticks and cardboard in the 1980s), and I feel comfortable doing my own maintenance and simple remodeling jobs.
So we stopped by CompUsa and looked at the selection of home design software. The product family that appeared to have the most features was made by Punch! so we picked up a copy of their Punch! Professional Home Design. My first project was to design a garage, since we plan to build our new home in stages, living in an apartment over the garage at first. Here's what the experience is like:
Layout
Punch! is, first and foremost, a drafting table. So it's set up like a drafting table, with a big "sheet of paper" in the senter and an array of tools around the edges. Across the top of the sheet are the basic tasks in designing a house, one per tab:
FOUNDATION | EXTERIOR WALLS | INTERIOR | ELECTRICAL | PLUMBING | HVAC | DECK | LANDSCAPING
Click on a tab, and basic design tools are displayed in a toolbar at the top of the page. Click on a tool and a scrolling list of design elements shows up on the righthand side of the page. Click on any of these elements and a library of specific types pops up, with fill-in boxes for standard properties. For instance:
Click on the EXTERIOR WALLS tab
Choose the icon for DOORS from the tool bar
Choose the GARAGE DOOR from the library
Enter Door width and Height on the Properties panel
You work your way through the house designing as you go.
What Punch! Professional Home Design Can Do
Punch! helps you design a house from the ground up (makes sense, right?), starting with foundation design -- slab, perimeter, or pier-and-beam -- with all kinds of bells and whistles like stiffeners, foundation slope, and footing and pier location. When the shape and foundation plan are to your liking, you start moving up. Add exterior walls, windows and doors a floor at a time, and paste in the interior walls, plumbing, electrical, and heating / air conditioning, also a floor at a time. Need to get from floor to floor? There's a whole slew of staircase designs.
Punch!'s AutoFraming capability places studs, headers, and other framing components properly without user intervention; you need only set the default stud spacing (16" on-center, 24", etc.).
For every element of design, whether doors, windows, light fixtures, sinks, or whatever; Punch provides a little toolbox from which you select standard types. Doors? choose from about six-panel, pocket, french, or patio doors. Windows? There's double-hung, casement, picture, octagonal -- whatever you might want. The same goes for choosing light fixtures, electrical switches (middle-of-the-run, two-, three-, four-, and five-way), even to the point of floor plugs and GFI-protected systems. All you need do is pick a spot on the wall (or ceiling or floor) and tell Punch! to put it there.
Doors and windows all come with property boxes so you can control their height and width and, for windows, height from the ground.
Done with the first floor? Move on up to the second and even a third floor, repeating the process as you go. Want a basement? Create a slab floor and put it eight feet below grade. When you're all done, you can put on a roof, picking pieces as you go (gables, hips, and various connectors). You can download more roof types (like the shed roof I need for part of the garage) from the Punch! website.
Wait, There's More
A house is just a house until there's something inside it. No, Punch! doesn't provide the love, but they do have a library of furniture, flooring, and wall-coverings to help you decorate (now there's a thought!). That furniture's not just static: you decide its color and texture as well as its shape. You can also design your external landscaping as well, from a toolbox full of trees and shrubs, not to mention slope design, cut-and-fill, edging, flowerbeds; the whole nine yards as it were. There's a separate module for designing decks and (but of course!) for heating, ventilation and cooling.
Nope, Still More!
Have trouble visualizing your design from a blueprint? Not to worry, everyone does. That's why Punch! has provided three-D visualization tools that allow you to walk or fly around your design from the outside, even move from room to room through za fully-rendered image of the inside. The 3D module lets you toggle from a view in the framing stage (lots of studs, if you're interested) to the finished stage, even turning on decor so that you can stand in a room and look at the interior design you've slaved over. In any view, you can turn walls semi-transparent to get a feeling for the arrangement of rooms.
How Much Will All this Cost?
Another module is the construction estimator, which pops up a spreadsheet with a count of everything that goes into your design: 156 2x4 studs, two eight-foot garage doors, five GFI plugs, etc. Fill in your supplier's prices for everything, and you've generated at itemized bill. It's dynamic so, if you decide to add or subtract features, the overall price updates.
So, Is Punch! for Everybody?
Punch!'s greatest strength and weakness both is that it's made within the AutoCad paradigm. This makes it versatile: you can exchange blueprints with builders and permitting organizations without fear of incompatibilty. There's a huge volume of design elements already available for the AutoCad world. You can do a preliminary design and send it to an experienced architect to have it tuned up to fit standard dimensions and meet code.
On the downside, working in AutoCad imparts a vastly different look and feel from every graphics package I've ever seen (Corel, MicroGrafx, Adobe Illustrator, Canvas, you name it). It's simply unintuitive: grabbing what you'd expect to be a handle doesn't work like you'd expect, and resizing is a total mystery among other differences (the help isn't much help, either). For instance, it took me almost an hour to design a staircase that had a 180-degree turn at a landing.
The help isn't particularly useful: it's just a list of terms and how you get to them. This is great if you already know what "stiffener beam" or "GFI outlet" is for and how to use it. On the other hand, concepts are completely ignored: the words "kitchen" and "garage" do not even appear in the help index (now that is scary!). Tutorials for using the 3D viewer and the interior design module are pretty good, as is the basic tutorial for the deck module. This, I assume, is because these are sold separately and are aimed at a more "weekend-handyman" clientele.
Another thing that I found irritating is the lack of "non-conventional" elements. There's no way to create log walls, and I couldn't find anything about solar heat (passive or active) or solar water heating. It seems more aimed at constructing your dream home on a suburban lot.
If you're pretty up on the basics of home design, this software will prove extremely useful. It can save you much of the cost of having an architect design your new home, and the 3D viewer lets you look at a rendering of the finished product so that you don't make stupid mistakes. Oh, all right, so that it's harder to make stupid mistakes! But if you're a complete novice, this is not the place to start learning!
Recommended:
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