Punch! Master Landscape & Home Design

Use the 3-D Exterior Home Design program to view your home with 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. As you design, the Landscape Estimator compiles planting information, producing a report in an editable, printable, exportable spreadsheet format.

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. Users can also create objects from scratch or modify existing selections from a library. Change colors, fabrics, patterns, textures, and more, then use your creations to furnish your home plan.

I feel that this product is slickly packaged fluff - I would be very surprised indeed if a qualified horticulturalist or garden designer was in any way involved in the design.

Firstly, the site layout tool is fairly easy to use, allowing you to get the basic plot onto your plan. From there on though, things begin to go awry. There is a very poor selction of fence styles etc, but to custom draw your own is extremely cumbersome, using a clumsily designed and rather archaic 3D-Custom builder, which you must swap into and out of. In addition, the selection of styles for hard-landscaping surfaces is very limited, meaning you can only render a vague idea of the actual finish you are looking for. Finally, on the hard-landscaping front, the photo-importing tool (one of the main features that swung me in favour of this product) is terribly difficult to use.

On the plant side, it goes from bad to worse. The plants that are in the selection are badly drawn to a large extent, and one feature that is absolute fluff with no basis in reality is the plant ager. This feature ages all trees almost identically up to the age of 20 years, which is pointless. Even the most extreme novice is surely aware that a black oak will be considerably larger than an English Hawthorn as time progresses? More importantly though, the plants have no Latin names - which is quite shocking in any garden design programme. The English names are Americann-English, which varies wildly from real English (yes, I know it's an American product, but to launch it in the UK or Europe without taking account of this is lazy, money-grabbing marketing) It is for this very reason that Latin nomenclature is used!!!! The English list is not even alphabetical! In addition, the 'artists renditions' of many of tha plants are quite inaccurate.

I have read a few good reviews of this item on this page, and can only assume thay have been paid to write them. This is most definitely the worst piece of software I have ever purchased, and I will take it back to the shop I bought it from as soon as I can to try and argue for a refund. DON'T BUY IT!!!!!


Worthless   August 18, 2003
19 out of 20 found this review helpful

Afer 12 hours and about 35 crashes, I have a cartoon-like "landscape" that only vaguely resembles my property and isn't even useful for proportions. I was hard pressed to find a single feature that behaved as advertized.

THis software was worse than useless because it took the whole day to figure out how badly I was cheated.