Pros: Strong home design with many features and options. Equal to/better than 3D Home Architect.
Cons: Printing is fragile, no Print Preview. 3D Liveview movement can be slow & difficult.
The Bottom Line: Punch 5in1 will fill simple renovation and landscape design needs very well. The professional version is likely required if you want to extensively detail a new house.
cwkemp's Full Review: Punch! 5 in 1 Home Design Full Version for PC (201...
We are currently designing the custom home of our dreams for a plot of land we purchased earlier this year. The land has a ledge with an elevation of about 10 feet in the middle of the lot. Modeling the topology and house floor elevations required more features than our Broderbund 3d Home Architect Deluxe 3.0 was providing us at the time.
Our new requirements put me on a quest to test drive and find the best home design program for our needs. Over a weekend I tried out the following sample programs (BTW a summary of these can be found at http://www.b4ubuild.com/links/cadd.shtml):
For various reasons, be it the interface, the feature set or the price, none of these programs wowed me.
Chief Architect v7.0 was probably the best and I was already very familiar with the interface since it is the big brother to the Broderbund 3d Home Architect, but at $900US this was too pricey for our desires.
Finally, a friend recommended Punch! 5in1 Home Design version 3.5.2 (http://www.punchsoftware.com/) which is the focus of this review.
Generally, I do quite like the Punch products. In fact I recommend them. I usually leave my final opinion to the end, but I believe this review benefits from the suggestion that the product is worth buying up front. I say this because I highlight the deficiencies in this review in detail, but have left the proficiencies somewhat sparse as in general, the product meets the expectations I have for a home design project very well.
Punch will adequately allow you to model, test drive and modify many different aspects of your house whether it be for renovations, paint colours, furniture re-arranging or complete house design, inside and out.
Features I do really like about Punch! 5 in 1:
• The 3D walk through mode is useful, although slower than it should be for a CAD like program running on a P733.
• Creating walls and placing doors, windows and objects is quite easy. Modifying it afterwards can be a bit tricky, and sometimes you do need to nuke the wall totally and recreate it, but generally this is only a minor annoyance.
• Dimension lines are very well done. You easily figure out any desired dimension accurately down to the inch.
• General output. The printed floor plans and 3D Liveview are quite aesthetically pleasing.
• Feature rich.
With all of this said however, I did upgrade to the Punch! Professional version 4.0.1.
The features I wanted/needed which Punch! Professional boasts over Punch! 5in1 are as follows:
• Foundations - proper depiction of the foundations on floor plan layouts and the ability to elevate the foundation properly to create split levels or multi-level floors
• CAD Layers - ability to put different items on different layers such as foundation vs floors vs roofs vs electrical etc.
• Proper lot slope and topology management - In the professional version, driveways, and paths now sit on top of the topology instead of rigidly floating in air above the topology (in 5in1) and walls and basements now cut out the topology instead of having 5 feet of grass and dirt in your basement (in 5in1).
• HVAC, Electrical and Plumbing planners
• Proper support for curved staircases and railings. A neat bonus being able to walk up and down stairs in the 3D view
• Elevation tool is GREAT. You can put any object (wall, door, window, furniture, electrical outlet) at any elevation with a simple slide tool
I do highly recommend the Punch! Professional version over 5in1 (and probably all of the other versions) if you can afford the extra $30-50. The benefits are certainly worth the money.
So what are the cons? I examine some annoyances and deficiencies in the following sections. These are for the Punch! Professional version, but if the feature is in 5in1 the cons also apply there as well.
User Interface is somewhat Counter Intuitive
There are two main sections to this comment. Designing in the floorplan window and moving about the 3D viewing mode.
• Designing in the floorplan window
Unfortunately, the behaviour is not consistent as to what a mouse click means.
• Sometimes you have to click and drag.
• Sometimes you have to click, release, move and click.
• Sometimes you have to click, do your stuff and finish by clicking on the starting point.
• Sometimes you have to click, do your stuff and finish by double clicking.
I am always forgetting which tool uses which method and the ZOOM tool is downright bizarre. Click and drag upper left to zoom in, click and drag lower right to zoom out. What ever happened to the click and drag a box over the area to be zoomed to or click and zoom X%? Anyway, the interface takes some getting used to and I have been using computers for 15 years on platforms from Macs to Windows to UNIX. If the zoom was more accurate and the scroll bar jumps in the zoom mode more reasonable, I would not have listed this as a con.
• Moving around in the 3D environment
I don’t believe the designers have ever played a single 3D video game ;-)
Attempting to navigate the 3D RealModel “Liveview” viewing window still frustrates me to this day. There is no way to strafe (move side to side along a straight line), rotate, or elevate in the same view without incurring a new rendering start which unfortunately on a P733 with 256Mb of RAM is unacceptably slow. Actually, as an aside I did manage to get their support to help me by letting me know to turn my Graphics Adapator Hardware Acceleration down two notches (which of course requires a reboot - also making games like Diablo2 unplayable until you crank it back up and reboot...) which makes the 3D rendering bearable, but still not fast in a detailed plan.
There are two ways to control the viewing window and had the designers combined them into one it may have actually worked.
• First method: Grab the Dot_and_Arrow cursor in the floorplan window. If you click on the dot, you can move the perspective point just like a mouse pointer and the 3D Liveview will re-rendering appropriately. If you click the arrow, you can rotate the view around the fixed perspective point to spin the 3D liveview. The problem is you can’t adjust the viewing angle and move at the same time with the Dot_and_Arrow cursor.
• Second method: Left and right mouse buttons and the Little_Man cursor in the 3D Liveview window. This is almost impossible to describe for motion. If you click the left mouse button, you can move around on a level plane, going straight forward is challenging sometimes and requires releasing the click, getting the slow ‘final rendering’ reclicking and waiting for the movement rendering and then beginning to move again. The fact you cannot strafe left and right in this mode is very annoying.
Printing is very fragile
Aesthetically the printing is fine when it works, but my preference is definitely the printing from Broderbund Home Architect (and it’s big brother Chief Architect).
For a simple floorplan (no topology, single floor) the printing is fine and you can even send a plan to a plotter.
The worst problem is the absence of a Print Preview option. I’ve taken to printing to file, converting to PDF using Adode Distiller and viewing the file in Acrobat in order to avoid wasting tons of paper and ink.
Also you must specify “Landscape” EVERY time you print. This bugs me enormously because I always forget and end up printing twice. This should definitely be a default saved with each floorplan.
Finally, when your plan gets more complicated, things go to pot.
Mysteriously, you sometimes get dime sized floorplan prints. Support calls (on a usually helpful support line) have proven fruitless in this area. The only tip I have gleaned is 75% effective in avoiding this problem and is a “known printing issue” by the Punch Tech team.
Summary
Punch 5in1 would receive a 2.5 stars rating from me, but the $30 upgrade plan to the Professional version bumps it to a 3 star program. Also as a side note, future versions have the potential to really do well if they iron out some of the bugs.
The programs are very flexible and actually quite robust (I have had very few crashes and the programs have proven to be very backwards compatible with each other). Aside from the printing glitches and the 3D viewing quirks, this program will allow you to plan out a new home or renovation quite effectively.
Pentium PC or higher Microsoft Windows XP, Me, 2000, 98, or NT4 Double speed CD-ROM drive 16MB RAM; 95MB hard drive space 800x600 16-bit color display...More at Amazon Marketplace
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