Punch! Professional Home Design Platinum 8.0

• Sixteen powerful programs in one
• Includes Roofing Wizard, Topo designer, advanced lighting capabilities, and Deck Wizard
• Also includes Cabinet Wizard, Custom Texture Builder, and PlantFinder
• Enhanced user interface with 3D cut-away viewing tools

Amazon.com Product Description:
With Punch! Professional Home Design Suite Platinum 8.0 you get the power of professional home design software (Punch! Professional Home Design Suite), plus fully-integrated landscape software (Punch! Master Landscape). This easy-to-use home and landscape design package will have you planning the home of your dreams in minutes. Build the kitchen of your dreams. Make detailed landscaping decisions. Punch! Professional Home Design Suite lets you design and view all of your home's rooms in photo-realistic 3D. Punch!'s PhotoView technology lets you import real-world photos into your home and landscape designs to create a truly realistic image of your home. Fly through your design and see it from all angles. You can import a photo of your own home, add landscaping design or deck design, and then view your work from any angle -- all in realistic, 3D perspective. What's more, the software's LiveView window continually updates your home designs, in real-time and in 3D, as you draw. Meanwhile, interior and exterior 2D elevations are available with a single mouse click and the exclusive ClearView tool renders your design with a "glass house" effect, allowing you to see through walls to maximize your design space. The powerful 3D graphics engine also lets you create real-time walk or fly-throughs of your designs. Creating wonderful new spaces outside your home is just as easy as creating the interiors. The garden and landscape design tools allow you to create multi-level or multi-story decks with 3D photo-realistic textures, stairs, railings, object placement, and color capabilities. Helpful deck design wizards walk you through railing, baluster options, and more. Choose a basic shape or create one from scratch and watch the program draft a beautiful 3D rendering of your new deck design. Your deck and landscaping designs come to life with photo-realistic 3D -- complete with shadows -- giving you a stunning, true-to-life representation of your home design. Plus, the integrated PlantFinder provides extensive information for a wide variety of plant species including botanical name, soil and moisture requirements, mature height and other facts so you choose exactly what you want for your garden and landscape design. Tap into information for over 2,000 selections of flowers, shrubs, trees, ornamental grasses, ground cover, and more. Other features built into the Home Design Suite are designed to give you incredibly detailed control over your design decisions. Features like Cabinet Wizard for your kitchen designs, as well as modules for plumbing HVAC, electrical wiring, and even your house foundation are included. There's even a Home Estimator module for estimating your construction costs.

COMPLEX SOFTWARE WITH NO TUTORIAL!:
I am a CAD designer with 15 years experience on several platforms, 2d and 3d. I bought this package several months ago. I thought that with my experience I'd pick it up easily. After many hours I gave up on it. The manual is nothing more than a description on picks and clicks with lots of illustrations. As far as I can determine, no tutorial, either by Punch! or another third party exists and Punch! is unresonsive to my queries.

Poor Quality and Outdated Interface:
The documentation is sparse and more similar to a dictionary than a user's guide. There are video tutorials (screen recordings) but their simplicity limits their usefulness to the most basic of functions. The interface is typical of a quickly developed spec. If you know your way around a computer, you'll be frustrated within minutes. There are no keyboard shortcuts and the concept of objects and properties is primative at best. For example, when you go to drag a tree onto a landscape, nothing tells you what kind of tree it is. When you roll the mouse pointer over the tree, the ballon help says "Drag" instead of something more helpful like the plant name. Talk about some lazy programming. Little issues like that are so plentiful that you'll be cursing the program in no time. I also made the mistake of purchasing one of their add-on "power tools" called site planner and boy was that a mistake. It crashed whenever I edited or inserted a line. I sent an email to tech support and they replied with a canned email response blaming the video driver. I quickly sent back a response with all the useless details they asked for and I never heard back from them again. Take it from me, they use the term "Power Tool" strictly as a marketing ploy. Their power tools are more like amateur freeware utilities.

Pretty cool stuff:
I started with HD platinum and thought it was rewarding as i learned to use the program. In a few hours I had my college house designed right down to my roomate's EXACT computer, and my EXACT bed pattern. Very cool! My landlord loved it, and it's neat how much it looks like it looks in real life. There's still so much more i can do with the program, but after just a few hours I feel like I learned a ton. My roomate used it to design a bar for a school project and the teacher loved it. We both thought it was pretty easy to use and could do exactly what we wanted to do with it.

Punch Pro Home Design Platinum 10.0:
Software would not load, corrupt install file. Online help said use XP safe mode, same result. E-mail request for help was never responded to other than the auto response to indicate they had received my e-mail. Hope I can get a refund!

Useful program.:
Not for the faint of heart. This is a hard core design program. It will give you what you want once you get the hang of it. It's not real hard to learn, just intense programming. Very professional.