bit-tech Shopping: punch! Software Architectural Series

• Microsoft Windows 2000
• Microsoft Windows 95
• Microsoft Windows 98
• Microsoft Windows ME
• Microsoft Windows NT 4.0
• Microsoft Windows XP

Rating: 8

Time with product: 3 Days

Strengths: Support for nearly every aspect of home design, from foundation to landscaping

Weaknesses: Sometimes quirky interface; less functional in some areas than others

Summary: Overall, Punch! Home Design Architectural Series 18 (HDAS18 hereafter) is a pretty solid product for the price. It's big draw is that it is a home design suite. That is, it claims to provide the user with the ability to control every aspect of home design, from plotting the topography of your lot, to constructing your floor plan, to landscaping and adding furnishings to your new virtual home. For the most part, HDAS18 delivers on its promises. Unlike other comparable software packages, which are actually composed of several different stand-alone applications, HDAS18 is an integrated package. While there are different applets within the program to work on, say, the framing of your virtual home, all of these applets are launched fairly seamlessly from within the program itself. These applets, which Punch! calls PowerTools, run the gamut from the quite useful to the impossibly difficult to master. Topo designer, for instance, allows you to precisely edit the topography of your site, adding slopes and gullies to your lot which the program takes into account when you lay your virtual foundation. Other PowerTools, such as 3D Custom Workshop, are more frustrating to use. The idea of creating custom 3D objects such as furniture, decor, etc. to add to your design is appealing, but users without extensive CAD (computer-aided design) software experience will find this feature virtually unusable. I purchased this product primarily for its landscaping function. I want to add some landscaping to my existing home, and I wanted to be able to visualize my ideas in 3D before committing the time and money to creating a lawn that I would ultimately be unsatisfied with. Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed with the landscaping features of HDAS18. Like most of the other features in the program, it's fairly comprehensive. The software includes a fairly large library of different plants, which can be searched using criteria such as name, hardiness zones, and recommended sunlight exposure. However, I found that adding the plants I wanted to my landscape was frequently hindered by inaccurate information. HDAS18's plant database contains information on the size of plants, from seedling to mature, and it uses this information to determine how large the plant's 3D model should be. Many plants I attempted to use, however, were mis-sized at one point or another. For instance, I could only plant a sago palm that was 6' in diameter, even though I can buy a 12" plant at my local nursery. This can be worked around by substituting other plants, but it was a bit of a disappointment. Generally, the program's other features work a little better than the landscaping tool, but laying out the walls, floors, and roof of home plans could be simpler and more streamlined. There's a great roofing wizard, for example, that can create a hip roof for your design in just a matter of seconds. This didn't prove helpful to me, however, as I wanted to add a gable roof with a 10:12 pitch covering a living area with a ceiling having a 4:12 pitch. Ultimately, I was able to achieve the desired look by adding several roofs at different heights to my home, but there should be an easier way to do something like this. Likewise, soffits can only be added by awkwardly using the flooring tool and adding a virtual top floor to your design; this should be integrated into the roofing tool. Although it falls short of the ideal home design program, Home Design Architectural Series 18 is a well-rounded product for its price. It's stronger in some areas than in others, and none of its tools are perfect, but you could very easily create plans for an entire homesite, including topography, blueprints, electrical, HVAC, and landscaping using only this program--after overcoming the moderately steep learning curve, of course. Most other programs that offer this much functionality are probably out of the league (in both performance and price) of HDAS18, placing this program in the sweet spot of price vs. performance. If you want a home design program that will do everything but don't have several hundred (or thousand) dollars to spend on professional-grade software, then this is the home design suite for you.