Description:
Punch Professional Home Design Suite does something very few home planning applications achieve: it brings together designing both the interior and the exterior--including the garden--of your home on one CD-ROM. While the software is perhaps a bit complex to learn at first, the huge range of features offered make this forgivable. You can start with a blank screen, work with a pre-drawn plan from the software's library, or import scans of the existing floor plans of your home. Whichever option you choose, simply clicking the onscreen tabs allows you to switch between working on the floor plans, electrical plans, the plumbing system, roofing arrangements, heating and air conditioning, external decking, or landscaping. Getting objects such as furniture into position on a plan is mostly a matter of drag and drop, while you can also use a Computer Aided Design feature to draw curves, arcs, and other standard shapes. It is useful to be able to see a flat plan and a 3-D view side by side, and to walk through the 3-D view or do a flyover. You can even change the light direction, intensity, and brightness on the 3-D views to get as close to the real world as possible. With several useful tools above and beyond the designer, Punch Professional Home Design Suite is a rounded application. The 3-D Furniture Workshop lets you edit the library of furniture objects or design your own from scratch. RealModel lets you turn a home plan into a template for making a scale model--you can even print textures onto paper for pasting to the building materials. HomeEstimator works out how much it will cost to build your project life-size and how much of each type of material you need. --Sandra Vogel
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