Punch! Software today announced the newest release of the Punch! Concepts v4 family of CAD products for Macintosh® and Windows® design communities who need fast, flexible, and intuitive tools for turning ideas into precise designs.

Apple Macintosh Universal Binary
The Concepts product family now natively supports Apple Power PC and Apple Intel architectures providing a significant all around performance boost on Mac Intel based machines. Benchmarks show performance increases of 300 percent for most operations. Concepts Unlimited user Michael Young commented, “Concepts v4 is an absolute dream application with its stunning user interface and speed on my new MacBook Pro!”

Share Data with Other CAD/CAM/CAE Applications
The release includes enhancements to support IGES, STEP, AutoCAD® 2007, CATIA v4, Pro/E, and Adobe Illustrator. The updated AutoCAD translator adds enhanced support for paper space and drawing views. The Pro/E translator now supports Wildfire v3 parts and assemblies. Concepts Unlimited user Christian Kuehn commented on the Pro/E translator. “I recently imported a Pro/E assembly file that referenced 95 part files into Concepts on my MacBook Pro. I was elated to find a complete and editable file!”

Updated Core Technology
At the core of Concepts is ACIS®, a highly sophisticated 2D/3D precision modeling engine from Spatial. The v4 release includes the latest update from Spatial which represents over a year of enhancements including hundreds of changes improving that ultimately improve the user experience associated with challenging modeling tasks such as blending, chamfering, shelling, faceting, booleans, and local face operations.

Enhanced Photorealistic Rendering
Generating high quality photo realistic images with Concepts Unlimited is now easier with the new dynamic update option for tweaking material attributes. The new option provides the opportunity to preview changes directly in the drawing while still changing settings in the material editor. This new feature allows the ability to quickly view changes in attribute settings directly on the object in the drawing window. The new release also provides additional procedural materials for the roofing and paving users.

Punch! Software, the home design software market leader seven years running, today announced the acquisition of CADSoft Solutions Inc. CSI is a leading provider of precision based computer aided design (CAD) applications for Windows® and Macintosh® platforms.

“The acquisition of CSI takes us one step closer to our goal of becoming the leading global provider for design solutions. It extends our offerings to include precision CAD products suitable for the general architectural and mechanical CAD communities,” says Paul Bay, Punch! Software CEO. “In addition, releasing a CAD product line will allow Punch! to further expand its product portfolio and overall reach in the retail and online marketplace.”

The acquisition brings along the CSI development team led by industry CAD veteran Tim Olson, now Vice President of Development for Punch! Software. Commenting on the acquisition Tim Olson said “This acquisition provides an exciting opportunity to introduce more users to the innovative approach to modeling, developed by CSI, that encourages a variety of design communities to explore the benefits of 2D and 3D precision modeling”

Punch! Software LLC is a provider of home design and landscape design software products. Servicing retail home design, a sub-market of the architecture, engineering, and construction software market, Punch! provides homeowners, designers, and professionals the ability to perform all aspects of home/landscape design, including 3D walkthrough technology. Headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, the Company has been operating since 1998. Punch! was the fastest growing software company in the U.S. in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002.

Since its founding in 1998, Punch! Software quickly became the dominant market leader in the home design software category in both retail and online sales. With over two million units shipped and seven of the top eleven retail home design products, Punch! Software will use the same blueprint for success to introduce precision modeling to its established retail, internet, and professional sales channels.

CSI today announced the release of Concepts Unlimited 3.0 Service Pack 1. Concepts Unlimited, CSI’s flagship product for precision conceptual computer aided design, targets Macintosh® and Windows® design communities who need fast, flexible, and intuitive tools for turning ideas into precise designs.

Complex Shape Design Simplified

Concepts Unlimited Service Pack 1 adds to its collection of surface modeling tools a new option for constructing shapes using boundaries and guide curves. This tool preserves n-sided boundary tangencies as well as allows the user to control the shape between the boundaries by specifying points and curves as guides. Once created, the guides can be intuitively pushed and pulled to explore new shapes.

Core Technology Updates

The new release also incorporates a major update from Spatial, the creators of the popular ACIS® 3D modeling kernel. The updated kernel features several hundred changes addressing performance, stability, and enhancement issues. This includes improvements to advanced blending, chamfering, shelling, and complex surface modeling operations. The kernel update also includes enhancements to the IGES, STEP, PRO/E, and CATIA v4 translators allowing Concepts Unlimited to precisely share data with other CAD/CAM/CAE systems.

Italian Localization Support

CSI is pleased to announce that Concepts Unlimited Service Pack 1 has been successfully localized for Italian with trial versions available next week. Italian reseller Mind@Ware will be demonstrating the new localized version plus the MicroScribe implementation September 28th at the Design Library in Milan.

Other Notable Features

The new releases also incorporate a variety of changes that continue to improve designer productivity and ease of use. Key enhancements include:
• Tool bar data entry fields updated for architectural display formats
• Up to 4X faster performance for reading/writing specific file types
• Improved support for DWG/DXF files
• Improved pen weight and styles support
• Twisting and stretching enhancements
• Improved bill of material (BOM) handling
• Numerous updates to the AeroPack tools for aircraft design
• 75+ other issues addressed

CSI today announced the newest release of Concepts Unlimited, the third version of our flagship product for conceptual computer aided design. Concepts Unlimited targets Macintosh® and Windows® design communities who need fast, flexible, and intuitive tools for turning ideas into precise 2D and 3D designs.

Innovative User Interface
Version 3 introduces major innovations regarding the user interface that makes creating 3D designs not only easier but more enjoyable. Core to the new release is the introduction of the Tool Bar which organizes and displays helpful prompts, hints, and tips in an intuitive manner. The Tool Bar also provides rapid access to intelligent data entry windows for creating and modifying shapes without screen cluttering dialog boxes. Plus the new interface includes all new stunning alpha blended tool icons and cursors. Version 3 additionally introduces innovative changes to the snap inference technology by providing users with custom controls over transparency, background, and textual color thus improving the visual feedback associated with dynamic point snapping.

Enhanced Modeling Tools
Version 3 introduces a powerful new surface type with the Cover Surface with Guide Curves tool. This new tool is unique in the industry since the guide curves (or points) can intersect and do not need to touch the outside boundaries. This surface nicely augments the existing 17 NURB history based surface tools by creating shapes previously not attainable except through laborious methods.
Another new tool introduced in this release is the ability to pattern features. The new Pattern Features tool creates linear, cylindrical, radial, polar, along path, and spherical patterns from a collection of faces. This tool also allows you to pattern faces from foreign parts including data imported from our updated AutoCAD, Pro/E, and CATIA v4 direct translators.

Eye-Catching Rendering For Everyone
Typically creating photo realistic renderings requires a certain level of expertise regarding the lighting, reflection, and refraction associated with a scene. Version 3 eliminates this necessity for beginner users with the introduction of Rapid Render Environments. Now all users can quickly create impressive renderings with a press of a button by choosing either a metal, plastic, glass, or mirror render environment. These new rendering tools do all the work for the user with respect to adding lights, materials, drop shadows, and environment maps; turning everyday users into rendering wizards.
For those users wanting more control over a scene, Version 3 adds the ability to drag and drop environment maps into scenes. An environment map is a 2D image that is reflected back onto 3D objects. Environment maps are a great feature for adding visual realism to a scene without having to generate and position additional 3D objects.
The photo rendering tools can be combined with the newly introduced animation tools which can be used to explode assemblies or to simply animate objects and cameras along paths.

New Part Library
Version 3 introduces a new Symbol Palette providing drag and drop access to over 12,000 2D and 3D symbols including electrical, mechanical, bathroom, kitchen, construction, LAN, CMOS, doors, windows, counters, fasteners, HVAC components, and more. Symbols contain handles to dynamically position into designs adding to greater variety and detail.

Other Notable Features
The latest release of Concepts Unlimited incorporates a variety of new tools that continue to improve designer productivity and ease of use. Key enhancements include:
• Support for AutoCAD 2006 DXF and DWG file formats
• Native support for TurboCAD® for Mac files
• Updated ACIS modeling kernel and interoperability solutions
• Double line tool for quickly creating walls
• Dual Processor support for photo rendering on Macintosh
• Support for 3DConnexion® motion control devices
• Support for MicroScribe® 3D digitizing devices
• Unicode support for language localization for our Japanese users
• Over 400 changes and enhancements