Rating: 
Summary: latent2002
Review: Many software problems that they could not solve---not for a professional-After months of work on using the program, all was wasted and had to return the software. Printing problems-file conversion problems-half blank screens-it converted and cancelled walls that were exterior converting from interior--Not suggested-lost programs in my computer that the program no longer recognized.
Rating:
Summary: Unsuitable for intended purpose.
Review: My advice is to avoid this product. The manual is unclear and just plain inaccurate in places. Exact placement and manipulation of walls and groups of walls is very difficult and tedious. Many times I found myself having to delete several items and walls in order to change a specific wall. It would be extremely helpful if a wall could be locked in position with a menu toggle. Creating walls for vaulted ceilings was extremely frustrating. There is no automatic way to have a group of walls be the same maximum height and meet correctly with vaulted ceilings. This makes roofing design a painful process also.
The 3d views are graphically very good, but the controls for manipulating them are inadequate. It is extremely difficult to do a walk thru from the 3d window. The only way I found to do a controlled walk thru was by using the viewpoint tool in the 2d window. This causes you to do a lot of scrolling and wastes desktop space the 3d view could be using so you end up with less of a perspective than you should have. I have also run into strange glitches with the 3d view that would cause windows and doors to become solid walls again, despite still showing up on the 2d plan. Some times closing the program and restarting would fix the problem and other times I would have to discard the plan and revert back to an earlier save. This is very annoying and time wasting.
My biggest annoyance by far though is that there is no kind of feasibility checking in the program. With a consumer level product some kind of check to evaluate your plan should be present. Something to tell you that your floor needs support at a certain point or it will fall or the concrete pad you are pouring needs reinforcement at specific places. I know many other home design programs have some form of checking in them. It seems Punch software has no checking of any kind. This would be valuable to avoid many simple mistakes and to make the estimator tool much more accurate. If necessary elements are left out because you did not know they were needed, how is the program going to estimate the amount of materials needed with any kind of accuracy?
This program actually seems to be geared to a professional contractor or architect with knowledge of good building practices, but I'm guessing it would be inadequate for them in many other ways. There is not nearly enough help for the amateur designers who only want to tinker with their own house or put a dream home down on paper.
Rating: 
Summary: Many useful features, very easy to use, only minor glitches
Review: Punch AS 18 is very stable, especially for the wide set of features and capabilities it provides. It has never crashed for me using Windows XP. This indicates a very professional development team rather than a collection of disparate packages cobbled together in one box. I liked its ease of use a lot. After a few hours of modifying some samples and then doing a few simple plans from scratch, I feel very capable of using all the features I need. A few years ago I tried HomeDesigner. It was painfully difficult to use and it had only a small subset of Punch 18's features. I finally I gave up using it. Every 3D CAD program has unique ways to place and draw objects, rotate, pan, zoom, scale, view, and navigate and so on in the 3D universe. Punch is definitely one of the easiest I've used. 3D LiveView is immensely helpful in showing a perspective view of the 2D plan you are working. You can navigate in two ways. WalkThrough is generally better for viewing inside the house and FlyAround better for outside. WalkThrough is at a constant (but adjustable) height where you move forward or backwards and can rotate (pan) to any angle. It's like walking through the design at eyeball level. The camera is always in a horizontal direction. Unfortunately this does not allow you to look up at the ceiling. But you can select a wide angle that shows some of the ceiling. FlyAround is like a view from a helicopter. You orbit a fixed point at variable altitudes and distances from the center point. FlyAround always aims exactly at the center of the orbit. It's shown on the 2D plan and can easily be moved. You are always looking downward from the helicopter. Unfortunately, you cannot look vertically down because the max downward angle seems to be only 30 degrees below horizontal, an unnecessary restriction. LiveView has 2 ways to render the picture. I especially like ClearView, which is a 3D B&W drawing that allows the transparency of walls and other objects to range from almost clear to fully opaque. Sometimes it's very handy to see what's on the other side of a wall of the room you're working in. ClearView rendering speed is very fast. ColorView is a little slower, with 4 quality (detail) settings and 3 shadow settings (off, low and high). LiveView is displayed its own window, which makes it easy to move and resize the 3D view as you work with the 2D plan. This feature is certainly more flexible and much more practical than forcing it into one of 4 corners, or such similar limitations, that some other 3D CADs impose... Every feature they claim they have, they actually do provide, and in a consistent and integrated user interface that all work well together. There are a few minor glitches. The limitations of view angles mentioned above should be relaxed. WalkThrough is tricky in that it is too easy to move forward/backward when you only want to pan (rotate). It's too easy to accidentally pop through a wall when you only want to look around the room. This could easily fixed with a shift key or such that would lock one movement direction and allow the other. 2D zoom and pan is inconvenient in that you must use the mouse (no keyboard commands for zoom) and it seems to get out of control -- often way too fast. Visio's zoom is the easiest I've ever encountered: Ctl-Shift keys plus mouse buttons do all pans and zooms instantly and easily, with fine control (every 2D CAD should use it!). Similarly, more of the toolbar selections should have keyboard commands. There are 20 provided floor plans that go from simple to complex designs. These are excellent to play around with and learn what's possible. But none of them have textures or objects! The walls, floors, roofs, landscapes, are bare, no furniture, fixtures or plumbing, totally devoid of human habitation. What a lost opportunity to exhibit many of Punch's really great features. The most serious deficiency is getting wall to properly intersect with the roof. Punch provides 6 roof types, plus some very useful free-hand roof designing tools. It is incredibly easy to add roofs to complex floor plans. But you are compelled to MANUALLY calculate the heights of all points on each wall where it intersects the roof (by using trig, or a drawing on a paper grid). While it is hard to describe this problem in words, I'll try a simple example. You have a large main area and a smaller attached room to the side. What does the roof look like for this L-shaped plan? One roof cannot cover the whole thing. With Punch it is *easy* to select and place a suitable roof design over the two areas. Here's the problem: the common wall of the large area attached the small area will extend up to the two roofs. The wall has a complex shape. Fortunately, Punch has this shape among its wall selections. But YOU must specify the elevations and lengths of the oddly shaped wall. If you make them too large, the wall sticks up above the roof. Too small and there is a gap under the roof. Big birds can fly through it. Some of the sample plans show this problem (P018). Ironically, LiveView must perform these calculations in order to render a 3D view. Punch desperately needs the command: Extent Walls Vertically to Roof. All in all, Punch-bang AS 18 is a fine piece of software, lots of features, easy to use and with minor nits.
Rating: 
Summary: Fine for the consumer, but not for constuction documents
Review: Punch! AS 18 gets a C+ grade at best. It's fine for drawing up a house to "walk though" to get a feel for what it will look like, but it falls frustratingly a bit short of providing the tools needed to design real construction drawings that you could give to a contractor or submit for permits. I'm designing a two bedroom apartment over a garage, and I need to submit drawings to my city for permits. The last design I submitted to the city for permits was a garage that I designed using pencil and paper four years ago. I'm an engineer and I'm used to drafting in this fashion. However, it was painful when I had to make a change to a window or a door, erasing and re-drawing all the wall studs and everything. So, being the 21st Century, I figured that there has got to be some architectural software design program out there that a design/builder could use to draft up drawings to submit to the city for permits without having to manually draw wall studs (like AutoCAD and other general CAD programs). I searched high and low and found that you could spend $1,000 or more for a true architectural design program like Chief Architect or ArchiCAD, and everything cheaper seemed to fall into the consumer floor plan design category of not being able to produce real construction drawings. Since I draw up buildings for permits about once every four or five years, I didn't want to spend $1,000 for a program. I thought Punch! AS 18 would be just the ticket. It has a framing utility for automatically framing walls, floors and roofs, and it has an elevation editor. The frustrating part of this software is that on the surface it appears to provide the features needed to design construction documents. It's only when you put the software to work that you realize its deficiencies. For instance, the software has a framing tool for adding wall, floor and roof framing. It provides very "pretty" 3D views of the framing. But, when you decide to print a framing section, you find that you cannot print the section to scale. It also doesn't insert any dimensions or allow you to manually insert dimensions or text. Your typical contractor isn't going to pull out a scale to find that your header is 2 @ 2 x 12, and the city wants to see this information. So, you can sort-of work around this deficiency by saving the "image" as a BMP file, editing it in an image editing program like PaintShop Pro to print at the correct scale and add the required text. The question that begs itself is why Punch! didn't program the software to automatically display dimensions and text in the framing editor? It already has all the information in the design for header sizes, height, width etc. It also doesn't allow for edits to the rafters or studs. One of the rafters was displayed with a large spacing of about 25" on my design, while all the other rafters were spaced at 16" o.c. It doesn't allow you to edit this at all, and again, you have to edit the BMP file in a drawing program to try to get it right. This is only one of the deficiencies. The DXF export utility will export every floor on top of itself. So, when you open the file in a CAD program, you see a huge mish-mash of dimensions and floors on top of itself. The program really didn't want to draw a basement, and I had to do all sorts of work arounds to show one. At one point I had a 3' deep foundation showing up at 6' high in the air, and it took me hours of editing to get the foundation to display correctly. As with other reviewers, I had the problem of objects protruding through walls, and I had to constantly view the design in 3D to be sure everything was aligned and not penetrating another solid body. If all you want to do is see what your house design will look like after it's built by using the 3D walk through and fly around features, this product should work fine for you. However, it seems like there are plenty of lower priced competitors (3D Home Architect, FloorPlan 3D, etc.) that will do the same thing. If you want to draw construction documents, look elsewhere or draw it up by hand. While you may be able to monkey around with this program to get what you need eventually, either by editing in another program or editing with a pencil after printing, it's a frustrating experience when you know that other software out there will do what you need.
Rating:
Summary: Fine for the consumer, but not for constuction documents
Review: Punch! AS 18 gets a C+ grade at best. It's fine for drawing up a house to "walk though" to get a feel for what it will look like, but it falls frustratingly a bit short of providing the tools needed to design real construction drawings that you could give to a contractor or submit for permits. I'm designing a two bedroom apartment over a garage, and I need to submit drawings to my city for permits. The last design I submitted to the city for permits was a garage that I designed using pencil and paper four years ago. I'm an engineer and I'm used to drafting in this fashion. However, it was painful when I had to make a change to a window or a door, erasing and re-drawing all the wall studs and everything. So, being the 21st Century, I figured that there has got to be some architectural software design program out there that a design/builder could use to draft up drawings to submit to the city for permits without having to manually draw wall studs (like AutoCAD and other general CAD programs). I searched high and low and found that you could spend $1,000 or more for a true architectural design program like Chief Architect or ArchiCAD, and everything cheaper seemed to fall into the consumer floor plan design category of not being able to produce real construction drawings. Since I draw up buildings for permits about once every four or five years, I didn't want to spend $1,000 for a program. I thought Punch! AS 18 would be just the ticket. It has a framing utility for automatically framing walls, floors and roofs, and it has an elevation editor. The frustrating part of this software is that on the surface it appears to provide the features needed to design construction documents. It's only when you put the software to work that you realize its deficiencies. For instance, the software has a framing tool for adding wall, floor and roof framing. It provides very "pretty" 3D views of the framing. But, when you decide to print a framing section, you find that you cannot print the section to scale. It also doesn't insert any dimensions or allow you to manually insert dimensions or text. Your typical contractor isn't going to pull out a scale to find that your header is 2 @ 2 x 12, and the city wants to see this information. So, you can sort-of work around this deficiency by saving the "image" as a BMP file, editing it in an image editing program like PaintShop Pro to print at the correct scale and add the required text. The question that begs itself is why Punch! didn't program the software to automatically display dimensions and text in the framing editor? It already has all the information in the design for header sizes, height, width etc. It also doesn't allow for edits to the rafters or studs. One of the rafters was displayed with a large spacing of about 25" on my design, while all the other rafters were spaced at 16" o.c. It doesn't allow you to edit this at all, and again, you have to edit the BMP file in a drawing program to try to get it right. This is only one of the deficiencies. The DXF export utility will export every floor on top of itself. So, when you open the file in a CAD program, you see a huge mish-mash of dimensions and floors on top of itself. The program really didn't want to draw a basement, and I had to do all sorts of work arounds to show one. At one point I had a 3' deep foundation showing up at 6' high in the air, and it took me hours of editing to get the foundation to display correctly. As with other reviewers, I had the problem of objects protruding through walls, and I had to constantly view the design in 3D to be sure everything was aligned and not penetrating another solid body. If all you want to do is see what your house design will look like after it's built by using the 3D walk through and fly around features, this product should work fine for you. However, it seems like there are plenty of lower priced competitors (3D Home Architect, FloorPlan 3D, etc.) that will do the same thing. If you want to draw construction documents, look elsewhere or draw it up by hand. While you may be able to monkey around with this program to get what you need eventually, either by editing in another program or editing with a pencil after printing, it's a frustrating experience when you know that other software out there will do what you need.
Rating:
Summary: Punch! Software Lacks the Punch! it promises
Review: Punch! Software Architectural Series 18 promises to do everything easily and effortlessly but doesn't. Even with the printed manual and the video tutorials, it still leaves you trying to figure out how to make things happen. I am an architect and was looking for a design program I could implement into my business. I will keep drawing the old fashioned way with pencil and paper. This program is absolutely worthless. Don't bother purchasing it. The only ones who could ever use this program are the ones who created it. Save your money.
Rating:
Summary: Punch AS18 - no knockout here
Review: The AS18 is packaged in a beautiful box, one of the best. Perhaps this is a clue. But what's inside (the software) doesn't match the box. It was disappointing to save drawings only to open them again and note that the dimensions changed. Since this happened repeatedly, it was clear that this is an undocumented feature (UDF = bug). So it was time for the patch, which made the system behave far worse and didn't correct the UDF (bug). Worse yet, Amazon only refunded 50% of the purchase price of this software. Yes, that's it - a 50% restocking fee for buggy software. Well, this was not one of my better purchases.
Rating:
Summary: Buy or Upgrade NOW!!
Review: The new punch software package is great! The added and updated features add alot of value. They have also included a bunch of tutorial videos for the users new to punch. It still is as easy to use as previous packages but has added features like a DXF Importer which works rather nicely. I imported a complex CAD drawing and in under a hour I had a complete first floor Punch drawing of punch objects. This new package is expandable, punch has added "plug-in" functionality so third party players can add to it. Now if I only new how to program!! I haven't ran into many bugs yet, even if I do punch has started to be better at posting updates on thier site that fixes them.
Rating:
Summary: LetDown
Review: The software proved "fair" at best. Gable roof intersections with unlike pitches give "unique interior construction" results but not anything anybody want to build. The window offering include many shapes of fixed pane windows (triangle, round,hex, right right angle triangle) but they didn't include a rectangle or a right angle triangle with different length sides. Deck construction- want some frustration, use this deck construction software. Overall layout tool is good, foundation doesn't supply a foundation depth so on a slope you end up with a floating house (contractors will find that one difficult). I'm not an architect, I do use CAD packages (and will probably fall back on them to design again). Although kids will probably enjoy making houses with this, I won't recommend it for a serious home design or addition design.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for the price
Review: This a great product for the price. It is feature rich and fairly easy to use. The documentation is well done and the videos inside the program are very helpful. There are a few rough spots in the programming. You can tell this product did not come from a huge company like Adobe or Microsoft. If it did, I'm sure it would be three times the price...
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