Image in environment 'Refraction' slot appears dull when rendered??

Does anyone know why the image I have in my environment Refraction slot is appearing dull when viewed through glass? As you can see by the objects behind the glass, the issue doesn’t appear to be the material, or the geometry of the glass pane.

I have a jpg file in the Background and Refraction slots, with its mapping set to ‘screen’. This is the result I get:

Not sure why its dull… maybe try using it with spherical projection.

Also ur gamma settigns are wrong. Tick on Dont Affect colors and enable SRGB in ur VFB.

Also tick on “Affect Background” - this could be the issue.

yeah I usually have the settings you described, was just playing around to see if any of them made a difference. Nothing helps

Also, ticking ‘affect background’ only makes the background dull as well.

Hi Richard,

Would it be possible to attach the scene file to check it out?

Hi Tashko, here is the scene file including image. If someone could take a look that’d be good.
Background_refraction_test.zip (557 KB)

the issue is with the camera exposure and how you are applying the color mapping. When you expose up like that the jpg texture which is set to 1, is not getting exposed correctly for the refraction since, the affect background is unchecked, it would work for background only, not for the other channels. I would suggest to revise the logic there a bit and have the texture come up in brightness, with affect background off.

I am on a different opinion here. In order to get the correct exposure for the background Affect Background option should be ON.
If it is OFF Vray will apply exposure settings to everything but the background, and that’s exactly the case here.

Thanks guys. So basically I also need to increase the colour gain value on the background texture until it looks right?

Yes , this is one of the options in order to balance the background’s exposure.
Another option would be to use VrayDomeLight with the same texture and use appropriate value for the Intensity Multiplier.
And another one would be to wrap the entire scene into a sphere with VrayMtl and assign the texture into Self-Illumination slot with Compensate Exposure option ON.

Let us know if you need any further assistance on that matter.