So he overlaid the whole interior [of the temple] with gold. (Kings 6:22 NIV)
This article covers both Interiors and a version called AS3000-10, which is a hybrid of Interiors and Master Landscape Pro-8.
I. |
Introduction - Punch! Interiors promises to do for Punch! users the same thing that the Landscape and Deck versions did - provide a cheaper access to Punch! for those who only want to do interiors, not exteriors. With that in mind they've removed the foundation, HVAC, Deck and Landscape tabs, and added the Room Wizard PowerTool. AS4000-10 is a hybrid of Interiors and Master Landscape Pro-8, and therefore has some feaures that As4000 has and vice versa. Eveything below (down to article X applies to AS3000-10, and article XI details how it differs from As4000, it's nearest rival. The AS3000-10 is Interiors plus the Exterior features of Master Landscape Pro 8. It has everything Interiors has plus everything that the version 8 products have. It is missing a few itens from AS4000, which could be looked on as items of more "professional" interest, like the Symbol Editor. At the end, I will give a brief synopsis of the differences. |
II. |
Room Wizard - I new room wizard is available for those who want to "push rooms around" to find a good basic design for their house. You select from a number of essentially equivalent rooms, drag one out onto the workspace, and rearrange and move room models around to increase space utilization or achieve other requirements of your design. The wizard then converts the design into real walls (with room titles) for more detailed treatment in Punch! proper. It will handle the usual three Punch! floors separately. It eliminates common walls, of course, and enforces the rules about the exterior wallset. |
III. |
New Materials/Textures - Punch! has increased the size of it's texture selection considerably (which accounts for the large increase in product size). They've added custom textures which come from a number of building materials manufacturers, and some additional content themselves. My only problem is that they added the new content outside the traditional content, so if you're looking for something in particular you'll need to search several places for it rather than looking through a single, simple hierarchy. |
IV. |
Additional Accessories - New accessories for the wall accessory tool includes Bali blinds (another manufacturer-contributed item), |
V. |
Paint Library - a paint library is added to the Colors tab, courtesy of Sherwin-Williams. Paint by Number! |
VI. |
New Objects - New object categories are for Structural objects (stair handrail, ceiling sprinkler) and personal putting greens (another vendor-supplied item). Almost every category of objects has been expanded. There are now over 1300 objects in the standard distribution. |
VII. |
Selection Filter - A way to assist those who are having trouble selecting, say, a wall when a floor and windows are in the way. If "Walls" are selected alone on this panel, then selection with the Ctrl key will select only those checked features, and no others. It could be a nice feature; only time will tell. The panel is displayed when the small cursor icon at the bottom left of the plans window (next to the green floor selection icon) is clicked. |
VIII. |
Roof Tools - There are two new roof tools - a hole maker and a Skylight tool. The Skylight tool draws a rectangular skylight (a roof hole with trim) which can be changed into a hexagonal or circular shape, or the custom window facility can be evoked to draw odder shapes. The overall width, length and trim thickness are settable. The roof hole tools does for roofs exactly what the floor hole tool does for floors - opens an uncased (but closed) hole into a roof. This is exactly what's needed for a dormer, for example. |
IX. |
New LiveView features - LiveView features up to 15 palette groups, each of which holds ten colors or textures. The palette is located on the right edge of the LiveView window, and the button in the top right slides it in or out of view. This palette allow you to create coordinated sets of textures and colors on a room-by-room basis, which are remembered for later exact matching retrieval. The entire palette scheme cis saved with your plan, and may also be saved to a file for use elsewhere. LiveView also now has a dropper tool which can locate a used color or texture on the appropriate menu. The located color is displayed at the top of the menubar and highlighted by a very dim highlite outline, ready for re-using. There is another new icon on the bottom row. The "eye" allows for saving and categorizing LiveView image viewpoints, called "views". LiveView now has a more professional looking "spinner" to show that preparation is underway. It used to change the the lettering in the status display, but that went away in AS4000. Now there is a shaded sweeping bar. The point of these spinners is that if it is working, then the CPU is responding to the program in order to animate them, so that it is likely working correctly, computing something, even if it isn't responding to commands ("This program is no longer responding...."). |
X. |
Miscellaneous - The Properties/PowerTool/etc menubar on the right edge of the window has been increased in width, making the icons larger and easier to see, particularly plants. The materials icons appear to now show a miniature view of the entire swatch, rather than a custom thumbnail, giving relative scale to the materials. The flag in the lower right corner is replaced with a tool to set the orientation of true north to the screen. I don't know what this affects as yet. New edit commands: Mirror horizontal/vertical - adds a flipped copy of the selected items back to the original plan. A couple of options are added to stairs that modify the stringers, called "closed stringers" and "large base". There are also several new places where autodimensioning may be used, and optionally turned off, like in shapes. The wall trim texture pile-up has been eliminated. Formerly some colors and textures were shared between trims and a wall's autofloor, and it was impossible to have different trim finishes on each side of a wall. That has all changed - the various trims on either side of a wall have all separate color/textures, and the autofloor color/texture has been separated out. The "Unit of Measure" dialog has changed to allow for more output options. In english units, selections can be made for fractional or decimal inches, inches only, feet and inches. In metric, readouts in meters, centimeters and millimeters are available, as fine as 1/10 millimeter. Angles resolution is settable as well. An option for adding a floor, ceiling and/or soffits to a set of exterior walls has been added. It is accessed through a button at the bottom of the exterior walls properties (only accessable if there is more than one wall in the selected wallset). It has option for adding a floor (above the autofloor), and ceiling and an exterior soffit. Notice that these all extend over the entire extent of the exterior wallset (external to it, in the case of the soffit). The use of this option results in the indicated parts being built from manual floor pieces, so they are an automation of what the user could do for themselves. The soffit tool is handy, the ceiling nice, the use of the floor somewhat problematical. A small icon at the lower left of the plans window allows for filtering on selection. Using the icon to open a dialog, the user may select the kinds of items they want to be selectable when they use the Control key while selecting. This allows them to avoid walls when they want to select floors or vice-versa; in other words it is a way around the problem of not being able to selecct the item you want when there are others close by. |
X. |
AS3000-10 vs AS4000 - Essentially, AS3000-10 has all the features outlined here, which exceed those in AS4000. However, AS400 has several PowerTools which AS3000-10 does not:
Along with the Interiors' roof cutout there is now a deck cutout tool that operates exactly as the floor c utout tool works (it is not in Interiors, because decks in general aren't). |
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This page last updated on Thu Jun 01 2006 |