- Mac Home Design Software Reviews
- Home Design Software Mac
- Punch Home Design Studio Complete For Mac V19 Free Download
- Punch Home Design Software
- Punch Home Design Studio Complete For Mac V19 Review
- Punch Home Design Studio For Mac Reviews
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Punch Home Design Studio demo Unfortunately, I've tried to find a demo version of this program and I've failed. One site claimed to have a demo version but when I downloaded it, the package was labeled 'upgrade'.
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Punch Home Design Studio for Mac has an abundance of features, tools and objects to help you design your dream home, inside and out, even if you have never attempted such a project before This Mac home design software provides helpful design wizards that can assist you as you plan that kitchen remodel or bathroom renovation, or create an entire house complete with fully decorated interior and beautiful outside landscaping.
With 3D interior design software for Mac, you can make renovations to your digital home without spending a penny on paint, tools or labor until you are certain this design is exactly what you want. If you don’t like your digital redesign, you can tweak different aspects of it, or simply scrap it and start over. This software is a handy tool to have before you get started on the real thing and could save you quite a bit of cash since you’ve done much of the planning before consulting a contractor.
With this home design software for Mac, you can start creating your home from scratch or use a design template from the quick-start menu. You can easily drag and drop rooms into a floor plan that will automatically snap together – the Room Addition tool lets you add a sun room with a mouse click, for example – which makes it easy for beginners to get projects underway quickly. Among other things, this software lets you position electrical wiring and plumbing pipes.
This product gives you automatic dimensioning as you design floor plans. You also get home plan templates that you can customize, as well as a cost estimation tool that allows you to prepare a budget for your home remodel. The estimating tool is one of the handiest for your remodel project. Once you're satisfied with your design, the cost tool can produce a spreadsheet detailing material quantities, costs and schedules, and can break down the cost per room.
This home design Mac software can render your plans in multiple views, including a basic floor plan, framing, wireframe, 2D and 3D elevations, and aerial and cutaway views. You can even view the outside of the home from all angles using the helicopter and satellite modes. However, Punch Home Design Studio does not create movies that record 3D walkthroughs of your designs, unlike some competitors. In addition, you can export your finished product only in 3D, not 2D.
Punch Home Design Studio offers a kitchen builder to help you design your dream kitchen. You can create custom cabinets with the designer tool, and customize features as small as the drawer pulls and the door hardware, giving you the utmost control over the finest details of your 3D model home.
Punch Home Design Studio offers a plethora of design objects, colors, materials and more to help you create a realistic home design. It offers over 2,000 items in its objects library that you can place in your designs for a realistic rendering. Once you find your desired object in the large library, you just drag and drop it into your 3D model, which makes the process simple. The library offers appliances of varied shapes and styles, interior and exterior furniture, and even houseplants for those cozy finishing touches. It also has blinds, cornices and curtains for the windows. For landscaping, you get more than 4,000 types of vegetation in this software’s plant library, so you can choose to your heart’s content.
To help you use this software, you can view video tutorials. In addition, there is a list of FAQs on the website. Unfortunately, phone support is complicated. To get it, you must check the home page and call the toll-free number, which is intended to place orders but you can get to someone for support that way.
Punch Home Design Studio for Mac can help you whether you're planning your dream house, redesigning your kitchen, repainting the interior or exterior of your home, or landscaping your yard. Its substantial wizards, tools and full object library go a long way toward meeting your Mac home design needs.
Mac Home Design Software Reviews
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Home Design Studio 11.0, a new consumer-level 3-D architecture program, is aimed at people who want to remodel a room, design a home, or landscape a yard.
Punch Software, well known for consumer-level design software for the PC, has created Home Design Studio for the Mac from the ground up, and the Mac version has benefited from the company’s experience on the Windows platform. The interface is good enough to get you up and designing right out of the box.
The dilemma with this kind of consumer software is balancing ease of use with rich features and professional results. If anything, Punch Software lands a bit more on the feature-rich side of the equation, and the design results are often quite impressive.
It’s worth noting though, that Home Design Studio is primarily a conceptual and communication tool—it isn’t designed to produce final technical drawings suitable for use by construction contractors.
Home Design Software Mac
Contextual design techniques
In addition to its 3-D-modeling capabilities, the program comes with several numerous contextual Plan Tabs that provide tools and resources for specific types of projects. So for example, clicking on the Deck plan tab gives you a range of deck styles to choose from, while the Landscape plan tab gives you options like property line, path and driveway, sprinkler, gate, and so forth. Plan tabs also include: Foundation, Floor, Electrical, Plumbing, Roofing, HVAC, and Detail.
Punch Home Design Studio Complete For Mac V19 Free Download
The program also includes PowerTools, such as the Topography Designer and Roofing Assistant, which function as plug-in modules, and can do more sophisticated and specialized work. The Topography Designer creates the slopes and hills on your lot and helps you cut in a building pad for your house. The Roofing Assistant is particularly useful because figuring out roofs in 3-D is usually the hardest part of modeling a home, especially for nonprofessionals.
3-D in real time
Home Design Studio is great fun to work with. You’ll start your design in the 2-D window, but your work is automatically updated in a 3-D window in real time. The 3-D rendering window moved quickly on my MacBook Core 2 Duo testing machine—the 3-D-rendering engine had no problem keeping up with the 2-D design window.
Drawing walls, floors, and roofs is very quick, and everything in Home Design Studio is drawn to scale with actual dimensions indicated. Placing windows, doors, and other objects into the plan is also easy. To place a window into a wall you simply select the window type from the built-in object library and click on the wall where you want the window to be installed. The window is then automatically placed in the wall at the right height. You can then, if necessary, adjust its position, size, or height.
At any time, you can go to the 3-D window and view your model in various ways. A Free Walkthrough view lets you navigate through the model by moving in and out, and left or right. A Free Fly-Around view lets you move around the outside of the model and view it from various heights. For a landscape design, you can even “grow” the plants to see what they will look like after five or ten years. Also, you can import a photograph of your actual landscape to use as a background for your 3-D model.
Another really fun thing you can do in the 3-D window is add and edit colors and textures for all the objects in your model. Just browse the color and materials library and drag and drop your selection onto objects in the 3-D view and watch them change. The colors and materials provided in the library are very extensive and include paint colors, wall colors, wood floors and floor materials, brick and stone textures, tile, countertop materials, and much more. Many of the colors and materials provided are replicas of brand-name products that you could buy for your real project. This is a great feature, and while the library that comes with Home Design Studio is already extensive, I encourage Punch Software to add more real-world manufacturers and products into future versions.
Some quirks
Once you get over how fun it is to play with Home Design Studio, you will likely run into a few frustrations. I often found that objects such as furniture or lighting fixtures would initially be placed at locations that I did not intend, such as a lighting fixture showing up on my floor. So there is a fair amount of correction that you’ll need to do as you add more details to your model.
It can take some time and patience to master the technique of placing objects—such as kitchen cabinets—precisely, so that they line up and display properly. Furthermore, it isn’t immediately obvious how to use all the tools. Home Design Studio would benefit from a quick start-type guide, because most users will not read the 200-page user manual before starting a project. Lastly, some of the nicest features, such as the tools for creating topography or custom cabinets, are somewhat buried in the interface and can easily be overlooked.
Macworld’s buying advice
Punch Home Design Software
If you want to landscape your yard, remodel your kitchen, design a new home, or just want to have some fun by playing architect, Home Design Studio 11.0 is great software at a reasonable price. It’ll also serve to assist you in communicating your ideas to experts such as architects and interior designers.
[ Greg Miller is an architect and an interactive software and Web developer specializing in new media for the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction, and publishing markets. ]