Building and Landscape

i've been tempted many times over the years to buy one of those 'home design' programs. you know the ones i mean; you build a house and do the landscaping and then it lets you do a 3d walkthru. yeah, one of those. well, i bought one. it's called "Punch! Home and Landscape Design". i wasnt quite sure how steep this learning curve was going to be but i'm happy with what i've found along those lines so far. it's very easy to start and do a LOT of basic architectural type design. you do a floor plan type action and this thing will turn it into a 3d walkthru for you. pretty clever.

now, i also bought this hoping to be able to use FF textures. the included textures are ok, but not quite as good as a lot of the FF stuff. so far, it looks like it's not going to accept .jpg's or any other standard format. they're using their own file types, which, i'm not sure if they did because they needed particular characteristics in their file types or if they just wanted to maintain a lock on the textures and graphics. regardless, i havent found a way to import textures yet. i did visit their web site and it appears there may be an import and file converter, but i'm not real sure of that yet since i'm just going through a lot of stuff right now.

the program, when bought at a retail store, comes boxed with a nice, thick book/manual, plus the cd, of course. it's a fairly large install, requiring 4 or 5 gigs of harddrive space, but it went off without a hitch. i wasnt real pleased with being forced to register the product. and when i say forced, i mean that the program comes in demo/trial mode and will only last for 7 days unless you register. when you register it then turns on the full product and you're good to go. had i been aware of this beforehand, i wouldnt have bought the program. i find that kind of forced spam crap to be invasive and annoying. i BOUGHT the full version of the program, not a trial version! and frankly, just thinking about this now, i'm getting pissed all over again. there was NOTHING on the box about this sort of scam to get my email addy and other personal info.

in actually using the software, i've found some things missing, as far as i'm concerned; the 'furnishings' feature is missing a TON of standard household accoutrements. things like 'refridgerator', 'sofa/couch' and some others seem to be missing. and i'll qualify that a bit, since i certainly havent looked at everything this early. i do see that there is a 3d model builder built in, so that shld make up for some of the missing parts. i also looked around on their web site expecting to find downloadable items like those i found missing, but couldnt find a thing. so, i'm a little upset over that, as well.

still, it's a very easy to use program and i've gotten quite a bit done in just the short while i've been using it. the graphics quality is a little weak, there's a few things missing, the forced registration is really annoying, but overall, kinda cool. i've had several house designs in my head for a while with no way to really put them down on paper very easily. so, this seems to work.

Excellent, Craig!!!

Bummer that you can't import your own textures.....they probably do it that way to get you to buy their own texture packs/modules.....or get you to pay for an upgrade or something like that.....

I'm not familiar with the program, but I checked out their website and it looks good!!!

Well, if there is 4 or 5 gigs worth of stuff on the disks (which is huge in comparison to a full install of everything plus all materials in any other program that I know of), then I would imagine that there's probably quite a bit left to be discovered on those disks.....

yes, it can do imports, supposedly. havent tried it yet, but i did download one from google. it also does 3ds types.

guys, for $50, this is pretty much a winner. i still dont like the forced registration, but the program is very intuitive. here's the living room of a house i'm designing. this thing allows for adding all plumbing, electrical, heating with vents, air conditioning and much, much more. you can see in the pic i've got some plants outside, a driveway, ceiling fans inside, switches on the walls, electrical outlets and a number of other accessories. most of this is drag and drop. so, pretty cool

it's not totally, steve, but it does seem somewhat limited. and mostly, you can only import models and objects but not export...i think. i still havent really delved into that part much. i do know it says you can import 3DS models/objects and somewhere, i think it said you can import from google sketcher, but i havent found the google one. there is also something about importing 'objects' as opposed to models. not sure what the difference is there yet, either. and i did briefly check out the built-in 3d modeler, but i dont know if you can export to other formats from there or not. i'm still a newb mostly what i do know about the program is what you see in the picture there and that was all pretty much plug'n play.