"...neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, 'Behold, I make all things new.'" (Revelation 21:4-5 KJV)
[This "Ten Commandments" article cronicles the new features in the Punch! AS4000 release. It, even more so than the others in the series, is both wordy and also in a state of flux. I'm learning more about AS4000 every day, and as I learn new features and concepts, I'll record them here.]
I. |
Custom - Working with a trend that Punch! started in MLP with the custom Plant library, AS4000 offers libraries for custom plants, custom materials, custom base and crown trims, custom windows and doors, custom fences and custom 2D symbols. Note that custom materials differ from (and in AS4000, actually replace) the older "custom textures", which were color and scale modifications of existing textures, while the new ones are completely independent, new textures. Since texture and materials are, in fact, synonyms, I'll refer to the older custom textures as modified textures, while the custom materials/textures are the new variety. Supporting each custom library is a wizard to create the items for the library, and an "organizer" to allow for categorizing, copying and moving of items within the tree-like categories - the only restriction is that the file structure cannot have more than two layers of depth in it. Finally, Punch! has added a series of sample entries in each library (except the plant one) which will solve lots of user's problems without even using the wizards. For example, there are ready-to-use double doors and triangular windows which are pitch-modifiable. |
II. |
Accessories - There is a button on the Floor plan showing drapes; it is called the Accessories button. After you press it you can attach a rectangular 2D sheet to a wall, parallel to it's surface, and adjust its width, height, elevation (from the bottom of the attached wall to the top of the accessory), and the distance that the accessory hangs from the wall. This sheet can then be textured just like any object. Opening the tool opens a menubar of "Accessories", which are actually textures designed to look like curtains, blinds and shutters, but you can use any other texture to color the accessory as well. This accessory can be a wainscot of any size, or any other kind of wall decoration on a wall. When used with the Material Wizard, you can create wall paintings, murals or any other kind of odd-sized or -shaped wall decoration imaginable. |
III. |
Topo Designer - The slopes and berms of the older Punch! tools are gone. In their place is the Terrain Wizard, which is a much more flexible (and simple!)tool for terrain design. The wizard thinks in terms of contours. You draw the contours - lines of equal elevation - of your land in the wizard. The wizard accepts these lines and their elevations, and extrapolates all the rest of the grid elevations from them (see The Ten Commandments of Terrain) and it generates a Punch! topography (.tpo) file in your "My Documents" folder. When you open your plan it looks to find that file, and creates a terrain for your model from it. All this is nice, but it comes at a price. The slopes and berms from your models created in earlier versions of Punch do not affect AS4000's models. You have to manually convert the slopes and berms into the contours in the wizard, and then delete them from the model (where they serve no useful purpose any longer). And if you want to export your model, you have to drag the .pto file around with it, else the terrain will be flat. |
IV. |
Door and Window Wizards - Doors and windows can now be created to almost any specification you desire. You can create triangular windows that match your roof pitch, double doors, and custom windows and doors that have odd trim (different sizes vertically than horizontally, perhaps), panels and "light"s you want to try out. All manner of shapes, curves and so on are possible. There are prebuilt windows that can be used to solve almost any triangular need you have without even using the wizard. Unfortunately, in the Framing Editor all windows are still rectangular, so it will show the framing of triangular windows which fit the roofline piercing through the roof. Doors and their frames, which have always been single pieces as far as color and texture go, are now three colorable parts - the door itself and the two sizes of the frame. It would have been nice if doors could be colored differently on their two sides; perhaps next time. Similarly, windows now have two sides which are separately colored. In both cases, the middle parts - the center casing on doors, the center casing and the pane dividers in windows follow the coloring applied to the "right" side of the door/window. Finally, there are some rendering errors in the frames that allow the edges of the walls to peek out of the frames; presumably they'll get touched up in an update. |
V. |
Trim Designer - Base and crown trim can be created to any cross-sectional outline now. Your trim creations are saved in a trim library along with the samples supplied by Punch!, and can be applied to base and crown just like the older base trim was available. |
VI. |
Roofing Wizard - This PowerTool, while it does not provide any functionality differences from AS3000, still makes creating roofs, simple and complex alike, as simple as it can be. Draw the exterior walls (yet another reason to get your exterior walls right), and call the wizard - bang, the roof is done. It doesn't do gable roofs, but rather hip, but a neat dodge discovered by RB Gardener makes generating a gable roof a snap starting from the hip roof. It makes the buggy 3- and 4-point roof tools obsolete. |
VII. |
Symbol Editor - is added to provide support for creating new symbology on your plans. It is based on the tools long familiar from the Details/CAD tab. Included examples include several compass roses, that I've long hand-drawn on my plans. Are we seeing here the start of a tool to combine the 3D Workshop and the Symbol editor into a way to create objects with their own symbology rather than just their outlines in the plans? Stay tuned... |
VIII. |
Section Detailer - is essentially an open-ended 2D/3D line drawing editor. It can be used to create the long missing parts of a complete building plan beyond Punch!'s traditional plans - the sectional and detail drawings. It is again based on the Detail tab tools. |
IX. |
Fence Designer - Finally moving away from the Punch! traditional four styles of fencing that all seemed to look alike, Punch!'s Fence Designer allows the creation of all kind of fencing, from practical chain link and ranch fencing to wrought iron and brick posts. About the only kind I really haven't seen is the rural barbed wire fences. |
X. |
Accessory materials - As mentioned above, the new library of wall "Accessories" is actually a library of textures. In every way they are like textures; they can be applied to any surface like textures, and they are treated by the software in an identical way. Since they are mostly designed to provide finishings for windows (curtains, blinds and shutters) they won't generally look right unless used with the Accessories tool. Note they are all rectangular, like the plants are. Those parts that the creator wants to disappear are colored absolute black (RGB (0, 0, 0)), and the software renders them transparent. Punch! has added a switch in the related .pt file of each accessory (and also each regular texture) which specifies whether absolute black is rendered as black or as transparent, so it can be turned off in a traditional rectangular texture or an intentionally rectangular accessory and the "holes" in the picture caused by dark shadow will be rendered black instead.
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XI. |
Relatively small changes, but of major importance to the user:
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Punch! developed some new capabilities that were incorporated into its latest outdoors package, Master Landscape Pro, and are now carried over into AS4000. So while these aren't really new, perhaps you want to know about them:
XII. |
Deck Designer - the deck designer is a wizard for creating decks based on pre-drawn templates. It does nothing new that cannot be done with the older deck tools (with one small exception), but organizes them and makes complex designs a bit more accessible. The small exception is the addition of a pair of tools for creating and deleting points on a deck after it has been drawn. This was expanded on in AS4000 to generalize the capability to all drawn objects. |
XIII. |
Surveyor - A wizard to create property lines from a "metes and bounds" definition of your property line. A metes and bounds definition starts with a known location on the ground, and then uses compass headings and distances to trace the property line. Unfortunately, it cannot handle the circular curves that occur in many definitions, but that can be gotten around through use of the CAD tools on the Details page. |
XIV. |
Plant Editor - as sited above, the first look at things to come for Punch!. Plants and textures have long been a thorn in users' sides, as they would not admit to adding to the Punch! provided libraries or for creating or adjusting the categories Punch! provides. With the Plant Editor, a user can create a new plant entry and organize it into a custom library of plants from a snapshot of the plant. |
XV. |
Photoview Editor - a general purpose image editor for working on the bitmaps (.bmp files) that PhotoView uses to adorn the 3D landscape. WHile this editor is rather weak in features, as compared to PhotoShop and Paint Shop Pro, it is handy for those things it can do, and it will presumably be augmented in the future. |
XVI. |
Bug fixed - The undersides of bookroofs and roof panels will now allow color and texture to be applied. |
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This page last updated on Tue Oct 18 2005 |