Punch! Home & Landscape Design Professional with NexGen Technology
- Professional Results made easy with Quick Start and NexGen Technology you can bring your most detailed ideas to life in minutes!
- Video Tutorials launch right from the help menue. We’ll help you from start to finish!
- Just hit the going green icon and watch your design become updated with energy efficient materials and objects.
- ?Editable pre-drawn designs make it easy to drop in a pool, build a spa, or add the perfect sundeck to your design.
- Integrated Internet – shop for materials, find a contractor, or import from Google Sketch up, we just made the possibilities endless.
Product Description
Punch! Home & Landscape Design Professional with NexGen Technology makes designing like a professional easy! You can design from the ground up; renovations, room additions, deluxe landscaping, interior design, and so much more. The patented Quick Start feature, paired with our NexGen technology, lets you bring your most detailed ideas to life within minutes. There are over 100 hours of video tutorials to answer your questions and you never have to leave your design!… More >>
Punch! Home & Landscape Design Professional with NexGen Technology
July 29th, 2010 at 6:21 pm
Why I bought this product:
I am a homeowner with a degree in computer science and a fair knowledge of various drawing and editing programs. After reading several product comparisons, I bought this software to design my backyard and pool as it seemed to have the best features for my needs. (My house had recently been rebuilt and I wanted to focus on landscaping and pool.Punch! Home & Landscape Design with NexGen Technology) This product advertised the ability to utilize “Topo Tools” with “Powerful tools to sculpt your property to perfection” and “Pool Designer to create your pool to exact specs”
What I got:
A very difficult to use, time consuming, and fairly useless program. I spent more time researching the forums for what should be easy common sense instructions then working the program. If the program did half of what is described on the front of the box within a reasonable learning curve, I would be satisfied. As it is, only get this program if you already have working knowledge of other higher level CAD programs….in which case you would already have access to better programs and wouldn’t need this one.
I am totally disgusted with this product and its company. I AM impressed with the companies packaging and marketing…how to sell a useless product with misleading pretty pictures and great wording.
I would love to get a hold of the programmers who wrote the programming for this product and explain what they need to do to make this a better ‘user friendly’ and accurately represented product. I would like to find out if I should have bought?Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer
Rating: 1 / 5
July 29th, 2010 at 7:37 pm
I have been using this product for a couple of months on and off. We are remodeling. I have used other home design software and am very computer literate. Holding a MS degree in Mechanical Engineering. This software is very awkward to use. I spent most of my time fighting with the tool. The 3D view works pretty good but the effort is not worth it. I tried to like the software since I spent so much for it. Unusable by my measure.
Rating: 1 / 5
July 29th, 2010 at 8:52 pm
Just installed the software and ran into some serious problems. First I was trying to change a door from hinged on right side swing out to hinged on left side swing out. I expected to be able to select the item and rotate but this was not an option. So the tool bar had a “flip” option but that flipped the door to an interior swing door. Then I saw a swing angle adjustment so first I tried to make the angle -90 (negative 90) degrees but that also made the door an interior. While trying to figure this out my plan got off center and I couldn’t see my design so I looked and looked for the standard hand symbol to “pan” the drawing. No such luck and then I noticed there where no scroll bars so I was just stuck. I went to help and found “pan” and it told me to click on the arrow button and a collapsible toolbar would come up with a pan button. When I clicked no such button. So I went to the website for a more thorough help knowledge base. When I put in my product and searched on pan no results…wtf? Then I searched on door and again no results. Ugh! So I called support, some kudos here, they answered in less than 3 minutes.
Turns out that to get the collapsible toolbar you have to click (and hold). The technician new this was a problem with the help instructions. Then on getting the door the way I wanted it, the procedure was to flip the door to get the hinges on the correct side and then adjust the swing angle to -90 degrees. Wow and this is a program developed in the 21st century? How about being able to select a right hand or left hand door to begin with.
With the time I spent researching which program to buy and the time it is going to take me to learn the program, I SHOULD HAVE JUST BOUGHT A MAGNETIC WHITE BOARD AND MAGNETIC STRIPS, CUT OUT PIECES AND LABELED THEM DOOR, WINDOW, CABINET, ETC. My project would have been done by now.
Rating: 1 / 5
July 29th, 2010 at 10:34 pm
Yes, this software is very comprehensive for the dabler in home design. And if you are happy to work with canned architechture software you should do fine. However, if you are like me and you find yourself chaining your mind and needing to tweak your designs, this software is NOT for you. I found the walls and many othe features with tracking dimenions overly sensitive or not sensitive enought. Some features allow tweaking, but not the one’s I was trying to work on. The free design on and then tranfer shapes just had too many bugs. I found myself looking at $500 or $1,000.00 sotware just to avoid the headaches uisng this software. I tried and tried and tried to contact Punch technical support but found it esier to heard cats tehn to find contanct email or phn numbers and get someone to return inquiries. All the bugs make me believe I purchased a beta version but it is a shame I cannot get upgrade. So, until I do, this review will remain.
Rating: 1 / 5
July 30th, 2010 at 12:15 am
I find this product useful for those small to medium projects where you want to get a sense of what the finished look will be without resorting to crude drawing tools.
It lets you lay out a space and add common architectural elements, such as doors, windows, flooring and other surfaces. The finished diagrams can then be viewed from a variety of vantage points, giving you a sense of what the final product will be like.
I happen to own a tablet PC, and to my surprise, the software worked great when using the pen. Over time, I’ve actually found this to be the most straightforward way to work with the software, although it’s not that difficult to work with the mouse either.
Unfortunately, at least for me, I find it difficult to model complicated areas such as curving walls, raised floors, and so on. Still, for the price, the capabilities are good, and you don’t have to be a drafting expert to get reasonable results.
Recommended.
Rating: 4 / 5