Punch! Home Design Studio review

Home Design Studio is Punch!

software's first foray into the Mac market. It enables users with little or no 3D experience to build models of prospective developments - extensions, interior remodelling or even that Beckingham Palace-style pile that you've always lusted after.

Home Design Studio, is, it must be said, a beautifully packaged little application, in a real box, with a real manual and even a full-colour brochure that shows you all of its capabilities - a rarity these days. It even includes a small booklet of example home plans to get you going.

The program's designers have reasoned that people are more comfortable with plans than with sections and elevations - that's where most designs start off, after all. You draw out your plan, insert your windows and doors and Home Design Studio does all the hard work of converting it into a 3D model. You can start out with the foundations and basement level and work your way up.

The program does a lot of hand-holding to guide you through the plan drawing stage, but we'd advise a very careful read-through of the manual and some practice runs to get yourself really comfortable with Home Design Studio's way of doing things. It defaults to centre-line measuring of walls, which can be tricky for the uninitiated - most people think about the internal dimensions of rooms and external lengths of walls when designing buildings. Even if you set it to surface measurement, it will still try to snap a new wall to the centre line of a previously drawn one. Probably the best way to approach it is to rough out the shape, then select walls and move them to their correct positions. The dimension lines associated with walls update to give you feedback here.

The Inspector palette lets you change the properties associated with walls and many other objects such as doors, windows and lights. One thing we found tricky, however, was mixing different wall thicknesses: change the thickness of one wall, and all connected walls update to that thickness.

Once you have the basis of your plot and plan worked out, you can add storeys and elements such as heating and ventilation, lighting, electricals and plumbing - all on separate, hideable layers, overlaid like tracing paper. Another layer is Landscape, where you can choose from a huge library of plants, shrubs, trees, ground cover and so on, either from Punch! itself, or from third parties (some are included). Arrange your plants on your plan, any additional pathway and decking, hit the LiveView button and you get a fully rendered OpenGL view of your scheme that you can walk around and fly over in real time (depending on your processor and graphics card).

One point here - the view manipulation controls aren't the best. Punch!, please fix them. That aside, you can decide the age of your planting so you can see how your scheme changes over time, and you can select and filter plants according to their suitability to location. Judging from the calls we get at MacUser, the Landscape feature alone will justify the purchase price for many people.

Judging how your development acts with the sun over the day and at different times of year is vital in a building project. Unfortunately, this is where Home Design Studio falls down - badly. It lets you set the sun direction and overhead angle, but how many people will know these for every time of day and day of the year? All other programs we've seen let you input the geographical location of your plot, the month and the time of day, and then calculate the appropriate shadows for you.