Te Wero Bridge Competition in Auckland, New Zealand - Google SketchUp Workshop: Modeling, Visualizing, and Illustrating - page 31

FiG 2.8 When one of the component
instances is reloaded, all instances
change proportionally.
Note that, although all these components in Figures 2.6-2.8 have different
lengths and different widths, they are instances of the same component, and
updating all of them requires only one of them to be reloaded.
Step 7: Editing Submodels as a Whole 2 (Nesting
Technique)/Positional Modifications
Goal : Manipulate positional changes of component instances within
another component.
Inputs : A set of component instances created in the previous step.
Tools : SketchUp, the Outliner, nested component instances, the Move and
Rotate tools.
Sometimes, we need to evaluate positional changes of a scheme in addition to
its formal variations. I briefly touched upon the topic in one of the previous steps
as positional changes can also be handled by changing component definitions.
However, if we need to evaluate both options in various combinations, posi-
tional options should be handled at different component levels so that we can
manipulate forms and positions separately.
Tips
I cannot recommend the use of the Outliner enough, especially when one
has to deal with a complex model with multiple nesting of components.
The Outliner reduces the need for zooming in and out to search for
components or groups to almost none because all components are always
visible (even hidden components are visible) in the tree structure of the
Outliner, no matter which part of your model is showing on the screen.