Can someone explain exactly what happens when you update a Sketchup model within Layout? Perhaps if I understood what the mechanisms are behind the scenes, I could alter my work flow to realize better performance from Layout.

My scenario, and what prompted this query is as follows:

I have a 14-page Layout document of a construction project that contains all orthographic scenes from a single 3D Sketchup model. The first five pages are plan views with one drawing per page. the remaining nine pages are elevations with two drawings per page (24" x 36" paper space) at 3/8-inch = 1-foot scale. I have auto render disabled for the models and worked this way throughout the Layout part of the process to speed things up. I should note that everything is vector now (was raster to work initially - also for speed reasons). I've completed all of the changes in the model and finished all of my dimensioning, labeling, tagging, etc. in Layout. Finally, to my question, when I select each model in Layout and click on 'Render' (to update each model and eliminate the yellow exclamation point warning symbol), it takes approximately 30-40 minutes per model to update. There are two per page, so that equates to around 60 -80 minutes to update each page. Multiply this by 14 pages and it's more than an entire work-day to just update my drawing for output.

I realize that Layout is rendering the entire model when I hit update but is it really starting over from scratch each time? Does it not somehow cache the new render so that other instances of the model can incorporate the previous render pass? I must be missing something here.

Perhaps I should alter my workflow to extract any page that gets an alteration to a separate layout file and then I will only need to re-render that one time. Under my current workflow, even if I only changed one thing, in one part of the drawing, all of the scenes/pages/instances of that drawing have to be updated. Exporting these pages without updating results int the inclusion of the big Yellow triangle with the exclamation point (which is totally unacceptable for CD's).

Thanks in advance for any insight that may help me to avoid this time consuming task in the future.

Thanks,

Brent