Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Fuzzy Wuzzy's Summary:
** Not recommended. This product gives me the cold pricklies.
Prior to using this software, I had previously (7 to 10 years ago) used a much-simpler landscape design software called "3D Landscape" by the company 'Books That Work'. Since that product no longer existed, I was looking for another landscaping layout software tool (and did not need interior design features) that costed less than $100 and after doing some research, the two finalists that I was deciding between were this latest Punch Master Landscape Pro version 10.5.0 and the latest version of the Better Homes and Gardens "Designer" software, which is built on top of a third-party CAD software from a company called Chief Architect. I ended up buying this for the main reason that it was $20 cheaper than the other product.
If I was a professional landscape architect, I would definitely want to spend more for a professional CAD package instead of using this software because I find this product only adequate for casual doodling.***** Excellent 5-fuzzies feature ratings:
***** This design software is totally loaded with tools and *potential*. I refer to its many features as "potential" because this software could have been so useful and powerful if it did not have all of the many bugs and problems mentioned below.** Bad 2-fuzzies feature ratings:
** I have developed software for over 25 years now, and am very fluent in graphics design software. As the previous posters mentioned, this product is not for "the barely computer literate" or those without patience. You need to read the printed User's Guide and tutorials built into the software. But having done that, I still found it fairly non-intuitive to start my design process. Unfortunately, much of the online and printed help is done piecemeal, lacks descriptions of which features depend on each other, and I ran into a number of false starts because the workflow that I wanted to use (of starting with an imported scanned topography diagram and scanned floor plan) required some dependencies that were not explained in the help documentation.
** I rate this software only 2 stars not because of lack of features, but because the software is very buggy. For example, I set a 5-degree slope from the house to the front street. Regardless of how I kept trying to get this to work, the front yard did not gradually slope down at a 5 degree angle, but instead sloped slightly for most of the span and then plunged downward right as it reached the front street. I then defined a 20-foot front driveway that should have also followed the same 5-degree slope and the software has an option to set the driveway to "Float Above Topography", meaning that it should always be on top of the land. But, instead, a large jagged section inside of the driveway shows up as a hole; the front sidewalk also ended up with jagged holes in it. Punch has an online discussion forum, and someone had previously inquired about holes in their driveway/walkway, and the reply was to add more control points every 3 feet along the way, presumably to track the topography better. This did not fix my problem, even if I added a control point at 1-foot intervals. In defining my external walls, the software would frequently want to erratically connect the wrong two wall junctures together, resulting in having to delete the last wall segment that I drew and try again. Drawing inside walls also required the same wrestling with the software's bugs; sometimes after drawing a section of inside wall, the software would suddenly render a big hole in the floor, whereas if I tried to redraw it several mores times, trying to drag the line from a different direction, it worked.
** Adding plants to my design was easy, but I also encountered many bugs here. For example, there were two duplicate plants in the plant library with both named "Purple Smoke Tree", but with conflicting plant details - one of the "Purple Smoke Tree" entries was defined as having "Excessive" water requirements, which is a totally wrong description of this drought-tolerant large shrub or small tree. The size requirements of various plants, especially the woody shrubs and trees also seems odd. Some shrubs get initially inserted as having a very unrealistic 12-foot diameter width at "0" years age and then it just gets bigger from there if you change the years of aging. There are numerous inquiries on Punch's online discussion forums about resizing plants because the default sizings on plants were not realistic, and some of the replies were that the user should create their own graphic image with the desired scaling and import that into the software. Unfortunately, I found far too many plants in the software's plant library where the preset sizes and aged growth rates were extremely unrealistic, even if you lived in Hawaii or Florida and your plants grew like crazy. Another example: the pink shrub rose "Carefree Delight" gets inserted with an initial size of 8'6". (When was the last time that you bought a rose that was already over 8 feet tall???) Its plant detail describes it as having a maximum height and width of 10 feet. ("Carefree Delight" is not a climbing rose.) The image of "Carefree Delight" that the software displays is really bizarre too - an 8 feet tall and 8 feet wide monster rose hedge that looked like it was trimmed into a cube with a chainsaw. So even though the software says that it has over 4,000 plants in its database, I felt that I had to constantly add new plants or modify existing entries. Many of the plants' descriptions were mostly inaccurate to the point of being unusable unless you did your own outside research and manually updated their descriptions and attributes.
** With respect to initial sizings of plants and ease of resizing plants, displaying how plants age and change size, and displaying how plants look through the seasons, the "3D Landscape" software that I was using 10 years ago was actually *MUCH* better than how it was implemented here. More effort was focused on adding new features and less on testing all of the features and refining them to make them more user-friendly and consistently reliable.
** The software has a decent plant library compared with most software within this price range, but in this age of the Internet, there are tons of free online resources for every plant imaginable, with loads of cultural information and visual descriptions of far more plants than is provided by the software. There are enough numerous and widespread errors in the plant library regarding size and cultural requirements such that you should validate the plant details and update a plant's information that the software stores by verifying its information with gardening books or information found on all of the Internet sites. While it is apparent that there was much effort spent on adding features to the software, more time should have been spent making more accurate and descriptive plant information in the software's plant library. Punch! should have let a horticulture expert review all of the incorrect descriptions in their plant library because many of the entries have wrong descriptions.
** I was also misled by the glorious photo-realistic displays of the houses and gardens that adorn the box cover. Although the software proclaims that it has 2000+ plants in the database, from what I have seen of the selection of trees, roses, and perennials in the software's plant library, that number is quite likely exaggerated. And there are DEFINITELY not 2000+ 3D plant renderings to choose from. For example, I selected the aforementioned "Carefree Delight" rose even though I actually was looking for the Canadian shrub rose "Morden Centennial". But "Carefree Delight" was the ONLY pink rose in the graphics library (with the only other pink rose being a pink miniature rose), and so I had to use its image for all representations of a pink hybrid tea or shrub rose. And the pink rose was laughably rendered as an 8-foot tall non-3D image; as you move around your garden plot, the "Carefree Delight" rose image just always faces you like an 8-foot tall upright rectangular banner sticking up from the ground, without any canes going into the ground and with its crude rendering of leaves and blooms being way too large in aspect ratio... this is NOT a 3D image if it just looks like a flat 2D image placed in the ground.Fuzzy Wuzzy's Conclusion:
In summary... so the moral of my story in using this software for four months now is: (1) have PLENTY of patience in trying to figure out how it is supposed to work and how to overcome some of its bugs and quirks, and (2) make renamed backup copies of your design files and topography files as you proceed, especially when you first start out, in case you have a built-up design that suddenly gets fouled up. Being both a very avid gardener and expert computer user (also programmer and Web developer), I find that this software has a very rich set of features, but it is very unusable from a gardener's perspective, and is often very frustrating to use due to software bugs and tons of wrong descriptions in the plant library, and unrealistic (sometimes laughably so) graphic renderings of many of the plants.
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Punch Master Landscape Pro Version 10The NEW! Master Landscape Pro and Home Design v10 includes a more robust interface for editing, specifying precise dimensions, displaying options, and more. New enhancements for Pool Design, GPS Sun Angles and content updater along with 3D photo-realistic lighting, organization of custom objects, custom plants, and other program features add more flexibility and enjoyment to the garden and landscape design experience.
Click here for more information about Punch Master Landscape Pro Version 10
