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Landscapes and Decks

Home Design Studio is more than just a house design communication program, you can also design decks and landscaping. Hitting the Deck tab will cause the program to load several deck design tools. Users can explore designing decks with multi-levels, decks with or without railings and there is also a tool to produce "cut-outs" in decks for spas, et cetera.

While not a dedicated landscape architecture tool, Home Design Studio sure does provide plenty of tools for design and visualization. The program ships with over 4000 shrubs, trees, flowers and ground covers—and of course you can have a lawn. The rendering engine in Home Design Studio produces realistic shadows from plant objects. You place objects by selecting them from the Content browser palette. PlantFinder is the program's unique search technology for aiding in finding the appropriate plants for your region. (see image 07). You can select the appropriate plants for particular regions such as Southeast or Pacific. Plant Hardiness Zone maps inform you of what region you are choosing plants and trees for. (see image08). There are maps for the US, Canada, Europe, Alaska, Hawaii, and Australia.

07_Plant Hardiness Zones (can select from different regions in the world). You can correspond to a hardiness number at left and search database for all plants below or certain hardiness number in the PlantFinder database.	08 - The Contents browser palette lets you view tree species and plants and you can utilize the PlantFinder search feature to narrow down selections to that which lives in your home's region.

Once ready to place plants you do so in the main 2D window. You can select Live View at any time to see what your vegetation looks like in 3D. There is an "age" progress bar with a slider in the interface and you can grow your tree and plant design forward in time to see what your design will look like in the future. We only wish the age of the plants appeared next to the progress bar slider rather than the lower left corner of the main screen.

Other Tools and PowerTools

Home Design Studio includes an array of plumbing, electrical and HVAC tools as well. The user can actually spend time putting in things like switches, outlets and thermostats. HVAC tools include return air vents, registers and even air conditioning condenser units on pads. (see image 09). Plumbing options include bath tubs and sinks and a wide array of other items. All of this means users can adequately visualize their designs right down to the tiny features that make up a real home.

PowerTools are actually modules that come with the program and launch in separate applications. Topography Designer runs in a separate window and worked very well on a small lot of 100'x50'. You can work over topographic data obtained from a surveyor or from the www.usgs.gov site for topo data. Drawing basic grades is easy enough and produced a smooth looking graded lot. What we had difficulty with using this tool is understanding how to get your topo work back into the main window. We would much rather see Topography Designer be an actual part of Home Design Studio rather than a module that runs in a separate app.

09_Air condenser units on pads are just one of many HVAC real-life items you can utilize from the extensive library of 3d design objects for your home design.	10 - Part of the major charm of Home Design Studio 11 for Mac is the program's LiveView 3D OpenGL-rendered window. There are not textures yet applied to the house but you can clearly gain an appreciation for the look this program can provide.

3D Design and Final Comments

Home Design Studio isn't a 3D tool like say Google's popular SketchUp, nor is it a strictly 2D design tool like MacDraft PE (Personal Edition). While you may not have the modeling power of the former nor the drawing and illustrative power of the latter, nevertheless, Home Design Studio is a powerful integrated product that can provide the user with hours of design exploration and fun.

For this review, I felt it was really important to see how a true "newbie" to CAD or design would use such a tool. So I asked my wife, an avid gardener and physical therapist by education and profession, to actually install the program and start learning and using it.

So how did she do?

Surprising well actually! My wife had a great time creating a home much like ours and working with decks and landscaping. Instructively, where she had the most trouble occurred with making things snap at precise points (vertices in the CAD lingo) and with making walls with triangular tops—such as those on gable ends. Nevertheless, her output for a newbie was impressive -- thanks to the easy of use of this program.

Final Recommendations

To the developer (Punch) we clearly would like to see the implementation of an "intelligent cursor." It would make a world of difference and save time correcting misplaced objects. Secondly, a series of getting started movie tutorials are truly needed. Although my wife did fine, learning by reading a 200-page manual was tedious.

For the first version on the Mac we think Home Design Studio 11.0 is a very good beginning and so we congratulate Punch Software on a job well done. For end users in the Mac space Home Design Studio 11.0 may have some shortcomings but they are really minor in the grand scheme of things. This is an excellent Mac application that will provide hours of pleasure while you explore design options for your home project. It is also a good tool to use to communicate intentions and ideas to design professionals such as architects, landscape architects and interior designers.--- ANTHONY FRAUSTO-ROBLEDO, Editor-in-Chief.

For more information on Punch Software's Home Design Studio 11 go to:

www.punchsoftware.com

Published: 2 July 2007

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