I.
II.
Traditional Plans - A traditional set of plans for residential construction may consist in several or all of the following drawings:
- A site plot, with property lines, easements and restrictions, and possibly a contour plot;
- A floor plan for each floor of the house (a "floor" may include basement, crawl space, unattached garage, attic living space, and generally depicts basic features in a house, such as walls, stairs, doors, windows and so on);
- An electrical schematic for each floor;
- A plumbing schematic for each floor;
- An HVAC plan for each floor;
- A foundation plan;
- a roofing system plan;
- Deck and landscaping plan;
- Elevation and cross-section plans;
- Various detail plans;
- Materials schedules;
One can see the obvious relationship between the plans set and the Punch! program organization. Punch! has covered, to a greater or lesser degree, all the bases that the planset covers.
III.
Floors - Punch! supplies three floors for floor, electrical, plumbing, and HVAC drawings. It would be better to refer to these as plans or levels rather than as floors to avoid confusion. In Punch! it is technically possible to have two floors of data on one plan if that is necessary; the only problem is the visual confusion on the plan itself, since the elevation information about which floor an object actually occupies is not apparent in a plan view.
Punch! has, under the Edit menu, options for moving or copying any selected objects from one floor to the floor immediately above or below it. The thing is that when an object moves floors, it gains or loses the Punch! ceiling height in its elevation to the next upper/lower floor. Sometimes a user wants that to happen, sometimes they don't.
IV.
Too Many Plans? - As a matter of fact, Punch! also supplies three floors for the foundation, roof, deck, landscape and detail plans as well. These can be used in any way that you need them to be used; for example, all the furniture objects normally on the floor plan can be moved to the detail or deck plan, thus making them disappear from the floor plan but still in the 3D design. For another example, property easements could be plotted on the 2nd floor landscape plan.
V.
Inactive Floors - The objects on one floor optionally show through to the other floors (on the same plan) with the Design->Visible Floor... options. They show through in the "inactive" color, by default a pale blue. Objects on other plans of the same floor are optionally viewable as part of the current plan by checking them in the menus that drop from clicking on the currently active tab. Walls always show through on the electrical, plumbing and HVAC plans, and they cannot be turned off. When printing, these inactive objects are printed as well as active ones, and in monochrome they are drawn in black.
VI.
Walls and Floors - The first step in building a Punch! house is to think ahead, and the first part of that is deciding how to assign the Floors. Punch! has three floors available for use. Punch! calls them Floors, but they could better be thought of as drawing "layers". In this sense, a layer contains all the objects that are to appear on a single sheet of paper. In common practice, this is everything from the bottom of the floor (perhaps the ceiling of the floor below) through to the ceiling above, because the structures enclosed are mostly vertically homogeneous, with no two structures taking up the same floor space, so the plans are pretty clear. There is nothing to prevent objects from a higher or lower range being on any layer, however.
In Punch! there are three rules to apply:
- Assign the layers from the bottom to the top; Punch! provides some automatic elevation features which make this sensible. See the Ten Commandments of the Vertical for more on this.
- If a space has walls and a floor (even a dirt floor), assign it a layer.
- Pick the one point in your plans where the most floors occur vertically (including the dirt floor of a crawlspace) - that's how many layers you need, for a first cut. If that exceeds three, then you will need to do one of several things:
- Collapse two layers together into one. Hopefully two contiguous layers can be found to be placed in a single layer, usually one of which is relatively empty so that the plan for that layer is not too complicated to understand. This works best when one of the layers is a crawlway, and empty basement or an attic used for storage.
- Go to two Punch! files. This perfectly sensible way to handle the situation fails when you want to view the entire house in 3D at once.
- use the TKE PowerTool HighRise to increase your layers to six.
On split levels, two adjacent floors which do not overlap vertically can be on a single Punch! Floor, even though they don't have their respective floors at the same elevation.
Now, assign your floors to the Punch! Floors 1, 2 and 3, bottom to top.
VII.
Color and Texture - Objects in Punch! can be colored or textured; not both. Some things that cannot be colored or textured: roof edges (colored only), stair skirts (colored only, and only before version 10.0), wall edges (neither), roof underside (can be textured or colored in version 7.5 and higher). The sky is normally textured with the first texture in the Sky category; the ground by the first texture in the Grass category. For more on this, see The Ten Commandments of Color and Texture.
VIII.
Scale and Zoom - Drawing scale is of paramount importance on a paper plan. On a CRT screen it is somewhat less important, as it can be redrawn at a different scale at will. Punch! has the ability to set a common scale in either english or metric, and that is approximated on the screen (the reason we say approximated is because of the common assumption that your monitor has 72 pixels per inch, but it may actually have more or less). The zoom factor is set to 100% when the scale is set, but can thereafter be varied in the range of 5 to 300%. The scale affects both video display and printed output; the video display is also affected by the zoom factor. For more on this, see The Ten Commandments of LiveView.
IX.
Scale in Printing - The one place where the scale is important is when requesting a plan printout "to scale". Punch! will gather up all the objects that are currently visible (whether on- or off-screen, given the current floor and plan), and compute the amount of print space needed to create the drawing at the currently set scale. If the size is greater than the page size reported to Punch! by the selected printer, Punch! will compute the number of pages required to print it all and then do just that.
X.
Print to Page - The other plan print option is to print "to a page". In this case, the page size is known, and the scale for printing is set so that the whole plan fits on the page. Notice, in both of these cases, that one object far off in a corner, away from the rest, will have the effect of reducing the scale (or increasing the number of pages) for the whole drawing. The PlansPlus PowerTool can provide much more flexible printing options.
Both options for printing assume two things: that you want to print the entire set of objects on the Punch! plan, and the size and orientation of the printed page. Both print options always include all the objects in the Punch! plan (visible on the specific plan you are tabbed to or not), including berms, fences, plants, property lines and so on. The page size and orientation is reported by the printer driver to Windows and thence to Punch!, so if you have a large format printer Punch! can take advantage of it. You can even print to various "virtual printers" such as .pdf printers which create a .pdf file rather than a paper copy, or through drivers provided by retailers such as Kinko's, which produce a file that can then be copied to disk or CD or e-mailed to the local Kinko's or OfficeMax shop for the actual printing on one of their large format printers.
Users with plans that include landscaping often complain about their house only occupying a small corner of the page. This is because Punch! includes all the landscaping in the printout. The only way around this is to make a copy of your plan's .pro file to another file,. open it in Punch! and delete all the things that are out away from the house - paths, plants, fences, and so on. Then print, when the house is the only thing left. Another alternative are the print options in the PlansPlus PowerTool, which allows you to specify the range of the print.
XIa.
Large Format Printing - Doing a large format print, as trades-persons usually expect for residential plans, is no different from printing to a sheet-sized printer. The reason is that the printer's driver reports to Windows the size of the page that you selected in the printer selection dialog, who passes that data to Punch!. Punch! uses that info to determine how big it can scale a "print to page" job, or to determine how many pages it will take to print a "to scale" job. Unfortunately, few of us can afford to have a large scale printer hooked to our PC, even temporarily or on a network.
The best solution to this dilemma is to make use of a large format printer at the local copy shop. To do that the user must make a file in a graphics format that the print-shop's computer can use. Many chains have their own formats for doing this, and software. Visit the chain's website for details.
The most commonly used format for doing this kind of thing is the Adobe PDF format used by their Acrobat Reader/Writer system. A user would need to purchase Acrobat Writer, normally, to be able to create a .PDF document, but because of the popularity of the format there are a large number of lower-cost (even free) solutions for creating .PDF files. A Google search will shaow a great many; I have had good luck with pdf995 and CutePDF.
They all work in the same way - they provide a virtual printer driver. This is clever because all programs that might like to create PDF files have a printing function, so a specific program to convert every possible input format does not have to be written; the user simply prints to the PDF virtual printer (from Word, Excel, Punch! or what-have-you) and it creates a PDF file regardless of the program doing the writing. There are a couple of tricks to be followed, though, to get good results.
The PDF virtual printer is selected in the standard Windows Print dialog. Be careful, though, not to click on the PDF printer icon, becasue Windows won't give you a chance to set printer properties. Instead, click on the dialogs title bar, and then move the cursor atop the PDF printer icon, and allow it to be selected without clicking. This gives the user the ability to then click on the Properties button. The reason for needing to do this is that either portrait or landscape mode can be selected as required; the other reason is to tell the driver what size of paper sheet you expect it to represent to Windows, and thus to Punch!. The default is likely to be a standard 8.5x11" paper, which will cause disappointment when you get the results back. The larger format that the print-shop's printer will presumably support (better check that with them before doing this) needs to be selected. While in the printer properties, specify what other items you may want, such as margins and such as the dribver supports.
When, eventually, the Property's OK button is clicked, and then OK in the Print dialog, the virtual PDF driver will ask for a filename and folder for the PDF file it will build. It will then build the file, and its job is done.
Printer files (even when compressed) are usually huge, sometimes into the tens or hundreds of megbytes. The best way to transport these to the print-dhop is with a writeable CD-ROM (CD-R or CD-RW, or even a DVD format). One reason for using PDF documents is that they are smaller than most graphics formats because they store graphics as vectors, or drawing directions, rather than as bitmaps - that makes for great savings in file size.
Make sure that the size of the sheets you designed the files to create are specified on the work order. As with any such endeavor, expect your first efforts to have problems and allow time and budget to cover them until familiarity with the shop and its operators is gained.
One final trick, for Punch! in particular. If one knows the scale needed, and the size of the page being targetted, a rectangle can be sized and drawn on the plan which represents the maximum space printable on a single sheet. If, then, everything on the plan is kept within that rectangle, the plan should print "to scale" and will fit on a single page, The rectangle can be kept on the plan to act as a border, or removed just before printing, having served its purpose. It can be drawn with the Detail tab's rectangle tool, or with any other tool that can draw a line, like a straight path, fence, property-line tool and so on. Compute the size of the rectangle with the formulas:
length = page_width / scale
height = page_height / scale
height = page_height / scale
where "length" and "height" are in scaled Punch! inchs (dimensions show these), "page-width" and "page-height" are in real inches, and "scale" is the true scale ratio (for example, 1/4" = 1' means 1" = 4' or 1" = 48" for a real ratio of 1/48). An example of use: To size a rectangle for a 24"x36" format page at the 1/4" = 1' scale, the rectangle width would be set at 35" (allowing 1/2" margins on left and right) divided by 1/48, which is 35" * 48 = 1680" = 140'. The height would be 92'. I would then advise reducing the measurements by, say, 3%, to keep them safely within printer limits (note that most printers cannot print all the way to the edges of the page). Draw the rectangle on the Punch! plan with those dimensions, and keep everything on the plan within the rectangle, and that should guarantee printing to scale on a single page.
The PlansPlus PowerTool has a feature to draw such regions on the plan for you, given a printer selection and the current scale setting.
XI.
Exporting Plans to Graphics Files - Plans cannot be explicitly exported to an image file in Punch!. However, a screen grab image can be saved (or, again, the PlansPlus PowerTool can be used).
XII.
Screen Orientation - It is much more convenient to draw a plan when the main house axes are square with the horizontal and vertical directions on the monitor. This may require that you let the true north direction "float" while drawing the house, and adjust it later if you want true north upwards, as it usually is on maps. There are two sets of functionality to assist with that. The Design->Rotate Entire Plan... command will rotate everything on your plan except the landscape features; that allows you to play "what-if" on the direction your house will face. Once you have determined that, and it's not in one of the cardinal directions, then everything can be rotated so the house is square by the following procedure:
- On the first floor, draw a rectangle around everything (including landscaping) using the rectangle tool on the CAD/Detail plan. You will need to be able to see everything in order to do this; turn on all the plans-visible in the CAD tab, and make sure that Design->Visible Floors->View All Floors is set for each floor, and then draw the rectangle to take in all active and inactive (pale blue) objects.
- Expand the lot size so that rotating will not force anything off the side when it is all rotated.
- Use Edit->Select All and then Edit->Rotate... to rotate this floor as desired.
- Click on an edge of the rectangle and use Edit->Move To Floor->UpperFloor to move the rectangle to the next floor up.
- Repeat these last two steps for the second and (if necessary) the third floors.
- Delete the rectangle, reset the visible plans in the CAD/Detail tab, prune the corners of the plan landscaping, and decrease the Lot size as desired.
XIII.
Copying Objects -
Moving and copying objects can be accommodated in several different ways:
- Objects can be copied and pasted on the same plan (that is, duplicate objects can be made) using Windows Copy/Paste.
- Objects can be copy/pasted from one execution of Punch! to another, using standard window cut/copy/paste commands. As long as the two versions are compatible over the various objects and targets, things work fine. Be careful trying to paste an object from the electrical plan in AS4000 into Master Landscape Pro, for example; you may wind up with an object in your drawing which is impossible to delete.
- Objects can be moved and copied between floors in a single drawing using Edit->Move to Floor or Edit->Copy to Floor. Note that Punch! will add or subtract an appropriate amount to the elevation of the objects.
- Objects can be moved to a different plan on the same floor, with Edit->Move to Plan....
XIV.
Where is Your Data? - Backing up your data is always a good thing to do. Punch! makes that a bit difficult by mixing your custom objects into the Punch! data, so a guide which indicates what to backup within the Punch! folder is useful. In the listings below, all the files and folders are listed relative to the main Punch! folder, where you installed Punch!. The actual name of that folder will vary according to your whims when you installed, and the version of Punch! that is there. Also "MLP" is Master Landscape Pro, and *8 is the version 8 products: Platinum 8 and MLP 8. Folders to be backed up have a backslash at the end of their names; save everything within them recursively. Punch! has placed sample content in most of these folders already; saving them will save the sample content as well as your own.
| Versions Applicable | Category of Data | Folders/Files to Backup |
|---|---|---|
| All | Punch! preferences | P!prefs.ini |
| Undo/Recovery Data | Data\ | |
| "Customized Textures"; see Textures, Article X) | Textures\Custom\ | |
| 7.5 and up | Custom Plants | Textures\CustomPlants\ CustomPlantCat.ini |
| 8.0 and up | Custom Objects | Custom object files and categories in Objects\ ObjectCat.ini |
| Custom Templates | Custom templates and categories in Templates\ TemplateCat.ini |
|
| AS4000 versions and/or version 10.0 and up | Custom Materials (Textures; includes accessories, custom fences) | Textures\CustomTextures\ CustomMaterialsCat.ini AccessoriesCat.ini |
| Custom Fences (see Custom Materials above) | ||
| Custom Trim | Components\Trim\ TrimCat.ini |
|
| Custom Doors | Components\Doors\ DoorCat.ini |
|
| Custom Windows | Components\Windows\ WindowCat.ini |
|
| CUstom Symbols | 2DSymbols\ SymbolCat.ini |
XV.
The Basic Screen Grab - A screen grab is a very useful Windows trick that everyone should know how to do, for many reasons. It is not a Punch! trick, but is very useful for Punch! users to know, so we'll include information on how to do it here. A screen grab is a way to take the entire content of the display screen and place it into a graphics file, which can be e-mailed, printed and otherwise manipulated. It can be done at virtually any time under most any circumstances (like from inside any application), so that errors and unexpected occurences can be documented.
A screen grab starts when the user wants to grab a copy of the screen as it looks "right now". To do that, all the user needs to do is to press the PrtScn button on the keyboard. Nothing visible happens, but the screen has been copied to a Windows area in main memory called the clipboard. It will stay there until the clipboard is replaced with something else (which happens when you do a Cut or Copy operation in an application window, among other happenstances).
To get it out where it is useful, run MSPaint or other image editing program, and type Ctl-V, which will paste the clipboard into the Paint screen. There you can see it. You can then Save it to a graphics file or print it.
