Punch 5 In 1 Home Design

Unlike many comparable packages, 5 in 1 Home Design provides a fast and streamlined process for drawing floor plans from scratch. Moving wall by wall, rather than room by room, a user can lay out everything in detail. Whether you are reconstructing an existing house or dreaming big, the program's learning process is swift. It is still possible to end up struggling to convince the package that an interior room is indeed inside the house (and thus deserving of carpet rather than lawn), but these glitches are rare and relatively easy to amend. Anyone interested in having a basic plan done both painlessly and fast will love the interface this program offers.

Other tools in 5 in 1 Home Design allow you to walk through the three-dimensional model of your house, print out pieces of a model so you can build it yourself, and fit the home inside and out with furnishings and finishes. You can switch to these tools without ever shutting off the core floor plan, moving to an overhead view of the house and back, then breezing into a furniture-building application. To minimize headaches, all the data on each house is kept in a single file.

In short, 5 in 1 Home Design will help you put together homes just as you imagine them. The power so handily available in this design program makes it an obvious first choice for those new to home design software and a real boon for anyone looking to brainstorm ideas for constructing, decorating, or renovating a house. --Alyx Dellamonica

Amazon.com Product Description
5 in 1 Home Design is a fully integrated 3-D home design product that includes Ultimate Deck, RealModel, 3D Home, Landscaping, and Furniture design software. Punch's 3-D photorealistic technology allows users to fly through their entire design while enjoying great views from any angle.

Use the 3D Home Exterior & Interior Design program to view your home in thousands of subtle paint color choices, or design walk-out basements and split-level designs with the slope tool. When you're ready to landscape your home design, just add your plantings to your existing file. The software lets you landscape without redrawing your house plan. Your results are rendered in high-resolution 3-D, complete with shadows just like a photograph.

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. Also create objects from scratch or modify furniture from the included library. Change colors, fabrics, patterns, textures, and more, then use your creations to furnish your home plan.

Product Description
- Marketing Information: Power tools for serious home design PLUS Ultimate Deck for the perfect outdoor addition to your living space. 5 Powerful Programs in One That launch from the same easy-to-use interface, including our unique RealModel software that lets you build a 3D scale model of your home design! Product Information - Software Sub Type: Architectural - Software Name: Home Design - Complete Product - Features and Benefits: 3D Interior and Exterior Home Design: Thereandquot;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 LiveViewtm window continually previews your work, in real-time 3D, as you draw. 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. Choose a basic shape or create one and watch the program create a beautiful 3D rendering of your deck design.Ultimate Deck automatically calculates square footage so you can easily develop your materials list. And, since Ultimate Deck works seamlessly with all other parts of the program so can walk and fly-through your entire property. Your deck and landscaping come to life with pho

I thought maybe it was just me so I started examining the sample plans they provide. They all look like they are slight modifications of the same three or four plans, are all pretty simplistic, and most have structural problems. If all you want to do is draw a box with a roof on it this software will do it - but you'll still suffer getting it done. If you want to do anything slightly creative don't even bother.

If all this isn't bad enough they suggest that you download and install the "patches" for the program. The "patches" are over 150 megs. This size of the patches isn't that big a deal for me because I have a fast connection. If you don't have a broadband connection too bad I guess. The patches don't help with most problems anyway.

My last warning - there is a reason this software does not come with a money back guarantee.


It just misses   September 18, 2002
12 out of 13 found this review helpful

This is a program that seems to have so much, but then you find all of these stupid limitations that suggest the program was never "play tested". These limitations have made it almost useless to get what you need. Examples (in no particular order):
1. With the CAD tools, you cannot "group" graphic items like you would be able to do with any simple drawing program (let alone CAD).
2. The screen can show the "grid" spacing, but you cannot make a floorplan printout with the grid, which can be very useful for visuallizing and making hand sketches.
3. The furniture tool is worthless. You can create 3D objects, but there is no way to specify their size (no menu you can acess to enter dimensions, not even on-screen rulers so you can see it).
4. When you use the ruler tool, you can show the lengths on your floorplans. However, if you print a floorplan with these rulers, they are not scaled correctly with the rest of the drawing, so they give incorrect information for dimensions.

5. You cannot export drawings into a useful format (e.g. no GIF, JPG, etc.) that you could then import into other programs.
6. It is next to impossible to specify different wall thicknesses. You can customize a wall thickness, but then when you have a wall that connects to that another wall, the program automatically groups them together and makes the thicknesses the same for both. Yet another example where there is just no need to do this.
7. You cannot specify lengths that are a fraction of an inch. Everything is rounded to the nearest inch. I don't think it would have been that difficult to specify the variable as a floating point rather than an integer. But the programmers once again didn't think about it. In the real world, there are items and walls with lengths that have fractions of an inch.


Punch vs 3d home architect 4.0   August 29, 2002
Donald G. Hattier Dc (Dagsboro, de United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Punch is a limited program that is not very intuitive. The walls dont self sguare for a room, door choices are few, closet doors are limited, and measuring is difficult. I went to 3d Home, faster more intuitive, easier to use. Punch was a waste.