What our customer's say!

"does not work as advertised", I upgraded from Punch's Super Homesuite because I wanted to do Heating and Air Conditioning design (as well as model my house which is a 1 and 1/2 story house - a two story house with a room with a vaulted ceiling to the second story). AS-18 costs more money and was a step back from Super Home Suite. The moderator for Punch's on-line community states the software is really meant for visualization, not for actual design. Actual design is what I purchased it for. I am a Licensed Professional Engineer. I purchased the software for some remodelling projects and perhaps a shed in the yard. 20 years in the business and i found this software difficult, frustrating and unsuitable. I am still looking for a capable & easy to use home remodelling/design program. I wish I would have checked the reviews from Amazon before buying.

"AS18 Makes Simple Tedious", I have read the book, used the online help and still, this program just makes simple things tedious. For example: I create a wall, then click to move it -- poof there's a flyout menu in your face. Click the wall again and NOW you can move it.

There's just a lot of stuff like that. Little annoyances that make the simple, harder. I am extremely disappointed as the potential with AS18 is there. Maybe their new 3000 addresses some of the tedium, but I'm not willing to pay the price right now.


"Awesome Program!!!!!", Whaa... to the reviewer that gave this great program 1 star. Don't let that review stear you away from purchasing it. Of course there is a learning curve to every designer program. This particular version has a great user manual. A on-line forum that you can get expert advice on questions you may have. There are also video tutorials to help walk you thru step by step almost all details of building your dream home. I have been a PUNCH user for over 2 years and I own all the versions except Architectural series 3000. Down the road I will purchase it. I give this program 5+ stars!

"Unsuitable for intended purpose.", My advice is to avoid this product. The manual is unclear and just plain inaccurate in places. Exact placement and manipulation of walls and groups of walls is very difficult and tedious. Many times I found myself having to delete several items and walls in order to change a specific wall. It would be extremely helpful if a wall could be locked in position with a menu toggle. Creating walls for vaulted ceilings was extremely frustrating. There is no automatic way to have a group of walls be the same maximum height and meet correctly with vaulted ceilings. This makes roofing design a painful process also.

The 3d views are graphically very good, but the controls for manipulating them are inadequate. It is extremely difficult to do a walk thru from the 3d window. The only way I found to do a controlled walk thru was by using the viewpoint tool in the 2d window. This causes you to do a lot of scrolling and wastes desktop space the 3d view could be using so you end up with less of a perspective than you should have. I have also run into strange glitches with the 3d view that would cause windows and doors to become solid walls again, despite still showing up on the 2d plan. Some times closing the program and restarting would fix the problem and other times I would have to discard the plan and revert back to an earlier save. This is very annoying and time wasting.

My biggest annoyance by far though is that there is no kind of feasibility checking in the program. With a consumer level product some kind of check to evaluate your plan should be present. Something to tell you that your floor needs support at a certain point or it will fall or the concrete pad you are pouring needs reinforcement at specific places. I know many other home design programs have some form of checking in them. It seems Punch software has no checking of any kind. This would be valuable to avoid many simple mistakes and to make the estimator tool much more accurate. If necessary elements are left out because you did not know they were needed, how is the program going to estimate the amount of materials needed with any kind of accuracy?

This program actually seems to be geared to a professional contractor or architect with knowledge of good building practices, but I'm guessing it would be inadequate for them in many other ways. There is not nearly enough help for the amateur designers who only want to tinker with their own house or put a dream home down on paper.