I have had vue for a year and it has performed flawlessly for me till now. All of a sudden all of my views are grey with nothing in them. I have tried loading old scenes and new ones...all look the same. If I click in a view I get a flash of the wire frame for a second and then it goes back to the grey. Any ideas about where to look to fix this?

What version of Vue are you using? Vue 4.06? Vue 4.1? Vue 4.11? Are you working with OpenGL on or off? All this is important to know before we can answer you correctly. Guitta

Have you changed lately video card or driver?

and - not to forget: PC or Mac?

I have a dell dimension 8200 P4 with a 64mb NVIDA geforce3 t1500 graphics card. Open GL is on. Recently downloaded update for graphics card. This a PC.

BINGO! NVIDIA drivers can do evil things, and each one has its own particular brand of bad juju. I had the same trouble =after= I upgraded the drivers on my GF4-TI4400. Disable the OpenGL and see if that fixes it. If so, you might have to choose between newer 4 in 1's or using GL with Vue. All of the newer drivers are mainly game related improvements, and those tend to not get along with graphics programs.

OK.....I can buy that.....but how do I get back. Can I uninstall the driver update? I am running XP, so can I roll back to an earlier date and dump the update that way?

I am also using the NVIDIA drivers for the GF4-TI4400 with the OpenGL disabled and everything is fine.

In theory you should be able to roll the driver back to the previous version. I personally have found that this can create new problems. I use Win2k, so I'm not familiar enough with XP to know how it deals with rollback. I would disable the OpenGL first, just to make sure this is it, before proceeding with attempts to roll back a driver install.

OK.....I turned off open GL and vue seems to work fine again. What does open GL do....and what am I loosing by having it turned off?

You loose a lot turning it off. games for instance. It's a very fast way of rendering 3d stuff. Really fast. Smoke Direct ZZZ. But if it's getting in the way somebody goofed up something. It's a language all on it's own just for drawing things really fast. It's written right in the card so it has lots of advantages. I'd try to find the drivers you replaced and load those instead. Getting rid of open gl is to big a price to pay. I'd make it work somehow even if you don't use it in Vue like me. See upgradss are hazards ay?

???? You do =not= have to disable the Open GL support of the card itself; all you should have to do is turn off the Open GL support in Vue, which should only affect the preview window, if I remember correctly. As far as what it does, OpenGL is an API library that allows you to access any extra features of your video card. Rather like the Direct 3D part of DirectX. But it is one of those nasty open format cross platform API's that MS has been trying to kill for years...as it's cross platform and non proprietary. Well crafted. Consistent. Sun created it back in the days when it was King of the workstation (any video function coded in OpenGl is supposed to work on Windows, Mac, Solaris, anything that claims OpenGl compliance. One of the big reasons you see ports of the Quake series of games onto other platforms; John Carmack swears by OpenGL, and at DirectX). In the case of Vue D'Esprit, (and I will be corrected if I am wrong :P ), the OpenGL support is used to accelerate the rendering of the Preview image, and maybe some frame refreshing of the main image. The currently in beta 4.12 patch -may- address this issue. It seems to be an issue -only- with the GF-3's and -4's. Which leads me to think it has to do with the commands for the pixel shaders and vertex shaders being bolted onto the GL standard.

This is not just a problem with GF cards. I get it in XP with a Matrox Marvel G400 TV. Strange thing is though that I have a triple boot system. (Win Me, Win XP, and Mandrake 9) I don't get GL problems in Me but they popped up as soon as I got Vue working in XP.

Well i thought you turned it off right on the card. Open gl in Vue does not much. I don't use it. You loose nothing and gain the ability to make about 10,000 times more complex stuff in 1/10 of the time. Open gl don't do much in Vue but goof it up IMHO.