- Home & Landscape Design Studio For Mac 14.1
- Landscape Design Studio Madison Ms
- Home Design Programs For Mac
Our weekly deliveries of fresh, perfectly-portioned ingredients have everything you need to prepare home-cooked meals in about 30 minutes. Sep 02, 2009 Home & Landscape Design Studio for Mac 14.1 is a 3-D program aimed at home owners who want to design or remodel a home or landscape. This updated version creates a much richer experience for Mac.
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Punch! Software Home & Landscape Design Studio for Mac 14.1
Home & Landscape Design Studio for Mac 14.1 is a 3-D program aimed at home owners who want to design or remodel a home or landscape. This updated version creates a much richer experience for Mac users, than the previous package. New features such as QuickStart home layout, built-in green building tips and materials, and an expanded object library including Google 3-D support, will have users designing quickly and easily right out of the box.
Home & Landscape Design Studio (H&LDS) tries to provide you with results similar to a professional CAD (computer-aided-design) application with the ease of use and quick learning curve of a consumer-level design program.
Timesavers
One of this version’s new standout features is the QuickStart part of the SmartRoom technology. It works like this: At the start of a project, you drag and drop rooms onto a grid as simple rectangles. Want a kitchen? Grab the kitchen box, place it, size it, and move on to the next room. When you finish this rough layout, the program automatically creates a floor plan with labels and dimensions. But the plan is not simply 2-D; it is 3-D as well. So you can view your creation in 3-D, add an automatically generated roof, and view a photorealistic rendering of the project. Click the Continue button to move back to the 2-D design space to refine and modify your drawing.
This process works great on fairly simple designs (not too many twists, turns, or alcoves). However, when creating designs that are more complex, or after tweaking the walls of your design, it does not always work perfectly. For instance, the automatic roof creation function would often get confused after wall edits and come up with something odd, impractical, or just plain impossible.
Another timesaving new feature is the included library of templates. Instead of designing a kitchen from scratch, you can go to the template library and choose a pre-designed kitchen. Then you can decorate your kitchen with your preferred colors and materials. With templates for most rooms in a house, you can quickly plug in pre-organized rooms with minimal effort to create an entire home. You can edit templates for dimensions and content, but each element making up the template must be edited individually for good results. So, if you find templates that satisfy your vision when designing your space, then this process works great. Designing a custom kitchen or other room from scratch, or by modifying the included templates, is much more time consuming.
Fast photorealistic views
One really fun element of H&LDS is the real-time 3-D. Once you have the basics of your design down, try opening the 3-D window and watch the design update. Adding 3-D objects to your 2-D design will cause them to appear in your 3-D model immediately. Adding color and textures to finishes in your design will bring it to life and give you impressive photorealistic views. You can move through and around your design to see how rooms will feel, what the view will be from windows, or how spacious that bathroom really is. Punch! has improved the program’s performance for this release. Even on an older PowerBook G4, the 3-D rendering engine had no problem keeping up with the 2-D design window in real time.
If you are working on a landscape plan, adding plants to your landscape can be a little frustrating; they are so small and unimpressive when first planted. H&LDS solves this problem by letting you “grow” your landscape by up to 20 years so you can see how foliage will look when it’s mature. The program includes a fairly large library of plants and trees, although you will inevitably find that specific plants you would like to use are missing.
Going green
New for this release are “green” features that include “green tips” and green library objects. The tips consist of a list of general guidelines for green building. For instance, one tip is to include storm water collectors to be used in air conditioning, but there is no instruction on how to implement this in your design. The same green tips could easily be obtained online with more useful detail.
In my review of version 11, I encouraged Punch! Software to add more brand-name manufacturer products and materials to future versions and for this version and they have; the new version’s 3-D library includes items from many manufacturers, the most significant being a new group of Green objects for making more environmentally sustainable selections. These include finishes such as bamboo flooring and EnviroGLAS counters and objects such as wind turbines and solar collectors.
In addition, H&LDS now lets users import SketchUp objects from Google’s 3D Warehouse. This gives you access to thousands of objects from furniture to entire buildings. These objects are created by SketchUp users, so quality, scale, and usefulness may vary.
Construction tools
There is a new cost estimation tool for H&LDS. Estimator will help you determine the construction cost of your creation using a spreadsheet that is broken into sections such as foundation, flooring, and landscaping. Each section automatically shows the items and material quantities from your project that H&LDS has calculated for you. The catch is, you have to provide your own unit costs. For instance, if you have added a concrete patio, you will have to find out and fill in the cost per cubic yard of concrete in your area, including labor and delivery.
Also new is a Framing Editor that allows you to design your framing elements such as beams, floor joists, roof joists, and more. Note that no contractor will commence a construction project without a design executed by a certified engineer or architect. However, the H&LDS framing 3-D view automatically shows you what your house framing might look like, and is very cool.
Still quirky
Home & Landscape Design Studio For Mac 14.1
Home & Landscape Design Studio is definitely a fun program and can engage users in the excitement of designing. The tutorial videos are extremely useful for learning new tools. Keep the inch-and-a-half thick user’s guide handy, though, as you will run into situations that are difficult to solve through intuition alone. For example, creating a multiple story house is a snap but adding a staircase and cutting away the upper story floor will prove much more difficult. Once you get comfortable with the basics and start having fun, you will soon run into frustrations as you try to make your model more detailed and more dimensionally accurate.
Practical applications
Home & Landscape Design Studio users will likely fall into two categories: They’re designing a new dream house or dream landscape or remodeling an existing house or landscape. If you are starting from scratch and are willing to stay within the limits of the QuickStart features, the provided object libraries, and the auto-generated features, you can get astounding 3-D rendered views of your creation with a minimum of effort and time, especially when compared to more expensive and complex professional CAD and drawing programs. However, if you are drawing an existing home plan into the software, be prepared to spend a great deal of time tweaking walls, doors, and windows to get them to the correct size and positions. Specifying exact wall sizes requires a special wall tool. Changing the size of a wall and placing it exactly where you want can be challenging. Angled walls and other non-standard wall features are difficult to replicate in the software.
Home & Landscape Design Studio is marketed as a way for you to design your own home, and Punch! even includes a way to send your plans to a printing service where you can pay for prints. It also provides a way to contact contractors through a Web site referral service. The problem is that your drawings will not be exact enough to build from, or even to get a building permit. The drawings will lack information needed to satisfy local building codes and show construction methods necessary for producing construction documents. You would still need to employ a professional architect or designer for that. However, your drawings will be an excellent way to communicate your ideas to such professionals.
Macworld’s buying advice
Punch! Software’s Home & Landscape Design Studio for Mac 14.1—at about $150—is an excellent value for what it does well: create quick and impressive 3-D views of your dream home or landscape design that showcase your vision for your property. Staying within the bounds of the QuickStart process, the templates, and the provided objects and materials make this process a blast. But coaxing the program to the level of customization and accuracy demanded by construction documents or to create some of the impressive and detailed renderings used in their marketing, while technically possible, will prove a time consuming and sometimes frustrating experience.
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Punch! Software Home & Landscape Design Studio for Mac 14.1
Pros
- Impressive renderings with little time and effort
- Template library includes pre-designed rooms
- QuickStart features
Cons
- Entering existing plans and creating more detailed models can be time consuming and frustrating
- Green tips are not detailed enough
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Editor's Note: This review has been removed from our side-by-side comparison because it no longer ranks as a top 10 product. The original review is below, but check out our current top 10 reviews about Landscaping Software for Mac here.
Every yard is a fixer-upper. There is always one aspect or another that could use some sprucing up. Punch Landscape Design for Mac can help you with major projects like planning a new outdoor kitchen, as well as smaller projects like adding vegetable or flower gardens. It wins the Top Ten Reviews Bronze Award for landscape design software for Mac because it makes it so easy to drag and drop 3D objects and plants into your plan, handily recreates lighting for realistic views, and helps you predict how trees and other plants will look far into the future.
The software is preloaded with an impressive inventory of 2D and 3D objects, plants and templates. You can also import other images that you want to add to your design, placing them all in your yard's specific terrain, which is quite easy to recreate digitally with this Mac landscaping software. You can incorporate every little hill and rivulet, and later plan for the things you will use to get rid of them if that suits your needs better.
Punch Landscape Design for Mac can show you how trees will look in five, 10 or even 20 years. You'll know exactly where to plant that tree so you don't have roof or drainage problems in a few years.
This landscaping software for Mac offers a green feature that offers eco-friendly tips and ideas as you plan to reduce your home's carbon footprint. Also, true-to-life lighting recreation lets you see how the patio and deck will look for dinner parties.
Landscape Design Studio Madison Ms
![Studio Studio](/uploads/1/3/3/2/133279538/428034807.jpg)
Once you've completed your plan, you can take a virtual walk-through to see how your yard will look when it's finished. Being able to look out of the virtual windows into the yard is an interesting experience. This is important to be able to see what the outside views look like from inside each room, as well as what type of shade and light will be impacting the room. You can even view the outside of the home and landscape from all angles using the helicopter mode.
When you're happy with the layout of your landscape, the estimation tool produces a spreadsheet detailing material quantities, costs and schedules so you can get to work making your dream into a reality.
Home Design Programs For Mac
This Mac landscaping software has a polished, professional look. It has a great drag-and-drop interface that is relatively intuitive and easy to use. The look and feel has obviously been seriously considered and implemented to take advantage of the Mac's user-friendly characteristics.
Punch Landscape Design for Mac has the potential to overwhelm you with all of its options, and we did not find answers easily with the in-program help. Punch provides several types of customer support, though. Assistance online includes a user forum and email contact options. The developers also provide an 800 number for if all else fails.
![Studio Studio](/uploads/1/3/3/2/133279538/866941286.jpg)
This software is a simplified version of its more sophisticated cousin, Punch Home Design Studio for Mac, which offers more framing and electrical features for house remodeling, but Punch Landscape Design for Mac is still strong, enjoyable landscaping software. Quality lighting recreations, 3D plants and a slider tool for seeing how your yard will age bring your project to life on screen.