All of those sugestions will keep you going for awile. Thing is you just have to be patent, It's the biggest killer right there. When your working on big files you got to take 5 or it will never work. Think of what the computer is trying to do and it might seem like it's taking forever but a few years ago it would be impossible period. We are still on the limit of what the machines can do. There always saying there is no need for faster computers cause not one game out right now can take advantage of all the puter power we got now. It's this rendering that kills them, We are about 20 Ghtz two slow and about 32 bits short to do what we are trying to do right now. Thing is it can be done with planing and using ideas from above to make it work. People look at the art here and say hey I want to do that but they don't understand all the complexity of doing huge renders. It's the learning curve and it's not in the book. These ideas I've developed over years to make it work. Trial and error and even more error than you could ever imagine. I can safely say I can crash any computer no problem but the idea is not to do that even once. So I've developed this system over years of work that works actually quite well for me and now you have it to so apply them and just think when your waiting a minute for the screen to update that same problem might have took me months to work around. So you can almost get a speeding ticket using my ideas in your renders compared to my first tries and crashes. My whole idea of getting vue was to push the envelope and see what this program can do. This program can do way more and work on way more complex stuff than you could imagine. Other programs I got here that cost thousands would die no problem under the same load I put vue threw. Oh one more thing I turn off that instant preview, it's a little too small to be much good. If you need it you can click on it and it will update right then and there. To save time with layout stop test rendering at high render qualities.Use the first two setting to get a idea if your stuff is indeed sitting on the ground and not up in the air. It's a waste of time rendering high quality just to check placement. Also use render area lots for quick checks on different areas. Also when it becomes poly line madness I turn down the line detail a bit to help speed things up too but you get the same effect by using hidden layers. There is lots of posts here by me about grouping and other topics that will also help you speed things up even more. You're now one light year ahead of where I started way back when. Use it wisely.