The Ten Commandments of Getting Started

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made." (John 1:1-3 KJV)

Do you want to save yourself a lot of grief? If you have Windows 2000 or XP, open any folder on your desktop, and go to Tools->Options->View, and uncheck the option that reads "Hide extensions for known file types". This is the worst common crock that Microsoft has inflicted on Windows users; it hides part of the name of some files all the time.

I.
Read the Basics - Read The Ten Commandments of the Punch! Basics to get some of the Punch! jargon and concepts down. If you are confused about why Punch! does things the way it does, or to gain insight as to how it does them, look at the other titles in the set, particularly the "Philosophy" title, where I explore the why behind the how.
II.

Planning Ahead - The first thing to do is planning. If this job is to document an existing house, then perhaps there is not much planning to do; you just need to launch off into measuring and drawing. On the other hand, suppose you are wanting to create a summer house in mountainous terrain. In that case, it's possible you'll want to first draw the terrain and plant trees representative of those on the property. Then you can walk around your property and take in the view from various places, determining where and how to orient your proposed house.
 
First, allocate the floors. Punch! has three floors available for use, Floor 1, Floor 2 and Floor3, used from the bottom up. If your home has three floors, then there you are: Floor1 is likely for the basement, Floor 2 the main level and Floor 3 the bedroom level. If you only have two floor but also a crawlway or just a simple foundation, or even just stilts below the main floor, then use Floor 1 for that, and put the mian floor on Floor 2. Only in the case of a pure slab foundation should you go ahead and place the main floor on Floor 1. If you have a foundation plus three levels above, then Floor 1 will have to hold both the main floor and the foundation. If you have more floors than Punch! provides, you'll have to either "double-up" and place all the things on two floors on a single Punch! Floor, or use a tool like HighRise to add to your capabilities. See The Ten Commandments of Punch! Philosophy, article VI, for more words on foundations. 
 
You will want to be drawing your house aligned with the computer monitor. By that I mean that the principle walls of the house should be horizontal or vertical on the computer screen. Doing this may require that your property line doesn't align with the screen, or that the direction of north is not it's usual vertically upwards direction. This is ok. When you are finished with your design, you can then rotate the whole plan so that it aligns with any property line or true north, if you wish. Actual drawing is much easier along the horizontal or vertical directions, though.
III.

Setting Up the Stage - Defaults - One of the first things to plan is the verticality of your building. How high do you want the ceilings to be? How thick the floors? (This latter question is not as intuitive as the former, but needs to be considered. The average floor thickness in most modern homes is usually 12-15"). Will the upper floors be offset from the lower, and this need to be covered by secondary roofing? If you consider things early, then you can set up some initial settings for your design which will save you a lot of time later. Here are the items that need to be considered and set:
  • Punch! gives you three plan levels, named First Floor, Second Floor and Third Floor. These are really not floors; they are plansets (each one contains a plan for foundation, floor, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, roof, deck, landscape and a CAD sheet). In general a Punch! floor can hold anything you want to be in the entire plan regardless of its elevation; in practice, you want to slice your house up horizontally and assign the different levels to the Punch! floors in the same order as they occur in the house. First of all, you have only three such plans, so three levels is what you can accommodate. This doesn't necessarily mean three floors; if you have an empty basement, you can, if needbe, consolidate that with the floor above and draw them on a single plan. However, if you have a crawlspace, a main and an upper floor, then assign them that way: 1st floor is the crawlspace, and so on.
  • Design->Unit of Measure... - choose metric if you are of that persuasion.
  • The snap grid is, by default, on, and set to 1" increments horizontally and vertically. For detail on what exactly this means, look to the Ten Commandments of Grids and Snaps. This is good for most drawing, though occasionally you'll want to change the grid settings, or even turn it off, for special reasons.
  • Undo preferences (Edit->Undo preferences...) are set by default (if you are using Punch! version 4.5 or higher) to 25 undos. This means that your previous 25 steps may be undone, which is a very handy capability to have. More steps can be requested, up to 50, at a cost in disk usage and time. Drawing speed can be increased by turning off the undo feature, but there are several advantages to leaving it on. It backs up your entire plan at each step, so an emergency, like the erasure of your plan (see Ten Commandments of Punch! Problems, article I.) won't loose your work, and so that a power failure or a Windows malfunction won't loose more then the last step you did. Very helpful, indeed.
  • The floor plan trace feature (Design->Load Floorplan Trace... et al.) allows you to use an existing floorplan as a way to provide a visual basis for creating a Punch! plan. The existing plan has to be scanned into a graphics file, then imported with the command into Punch!. There is displays on the drawing surface, allowing you to trace the walls and other features with the Punch! tools, creating the Punch! 3D plan. When you've exhausted the trace's possibilities, you can then turn it off. The DXF/DWG Importer PowerTool allows for a similar method to use certain AutoCAD files, as does the Topo Designer. For more detail on how to use the scaling, see the topic in Ten Commandments of the Topo Designer.
  • Design->LotSize... (in AS4000, this is in the Topo Designer) - The Punch! lot is really the drawing area you have available and is always rectangular. Set the size of the rectangular drawing area; in Punch! this is maximally 500' x 500', or in AS4000, 1000' on each side. This may or may not include all your property lines and other things you may want to picture - if it doesn't, you can ignore that or re-center the drawing to get all the necessary items on, or go to a second file. The drawing does not have to include property lines unless you want to depict them.
  • Design->Default Ceiling Height... - For each floor, set the total height of that floor, from the top of the floor on that Floor to the top of the floor on the next Floor up. This height includes what one would normally think of as the ceiling height plus the thickness of the floor above. On the top floor, do not include the thickness of the ceiling above. You can find more information on this in the Ten Commandments of the Vertical.
  • Many other options can be chosen at start up, but by and large they can be changed at any time, and affect the entire drawing, so they can be set whenever a change is desired.
IV.

The Basement / Crawl Space - Now, on the first floor, on the floor tab, draw your basement outline walls using the exterior wall tools. It is very important that you draw only the outside walls with this tool, that you do a complete job at once, and that all the walls connect at their corners, so that when you are done you have a circuit that defines the inside of the house from the outside - this goes for each floor. (see The Ten Commandments of Walls for a complete explanations of this.) The The Ten Commandments of the Punch! Basics will give you hints on how to carry this out.
 
It is not necessary to get the exterior wallset (as this is called) exactly right the first time. The link in the preceding paragraph will tell you how to adjust dimensions after the fact to get everything exactly right. More corners can be added (or even removed) through techniques on that page. Draw it, then stretch and move it to get it to the right dimensions and lined up squarely on the screen.
V.

The Upper Floors - On the second floor, use the exterior wall tools again to draw the exterior loop that defines the outside walls of the second floor. Make sure all the walls are connected again. If you have an unconnected garage, make a separate loop for that. The same for the third floor, if you have one. For the most part, the exterior walls from one floor to the next should match perfectly, so you can adjust the wall corners and edges to match those that show through on the plan in very light blue color.
 
On these upper Floors you can see the lower floor's walls as pale blue lines, if you have the Design->Visible Floors->View all Floors option checked. It is easy to move the upper walls so they align with the lower, particularly using nudges and the snap grid.
VI.

Matching House to Terrain - Now, determine how far up the basement walls you want the ground surface to lie outside those walls. On the first floor landscape tab, use the straight topo tool to draw a "berm" over the entire lot that has a height equal to the distance you require for the basement. That will raise the land level so that the house is "sunk" that depth into the soil. (This will not work in AS4000; see the Ten COmmandments of the Terrain Designer).
VII.

The Top Floor Ceiling - Back on the floor plan of your top floor, draw a manual floor over the entire size of the floor (tracing the exterior walls), select an edge of it, set it's thickness to the thickness of the ceiling of the top floor, and elevate it to the vertical distance from the basement floor to the bottom of the top floor ceiling.
 
In version 10.0, Punch! has added a mini-tool to the exterior walls properties - a button which invokes a Ceiling/Floor/Soffit dialog. You can requested any or all of these constructions, determine the measurements and presto! - they are created based on the exterior wallset. Just another reason to get that right from the start.
VIII.

Roof - Add roofs as desired on the top floor's roof tab, set the elevations about a foot less than they are set by default (allowing the roof to settle on the walls). The actual amount will depend on the soffit width and roof pitch. In AS4000, use the roof designer on each floor that has roofs. See the Ten Commandments of Roofs.
IX.

The Rest - From that beginning start refining. If you have gable ends, you'll need to change the gable wall shapes. Add doors, windows, furniture, landscaping and so on.
X.

Assistance Available - There is a PowerTool named HighRise which will, given your desired ceiling heights and some other measurements, determine all the values that Punch! needs for successful vertical planning. the PTs will actually implement them for you. If you aren't using a PowerTool Enabled version of Punch (like Super, Pro, Master or Platinum) there is a Lite version (From the Ground Up Lite) which will display the measurements, which you then have to implement yourself. You can find out more about HighRise and From the Ground Up Lite here, and follow the links to the description and the Help documentation.
 
From the Ground Up Lite is now a free download; download it here.

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This page last updated on Sat Aug 19 2006
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