Hmm,
i think brazil and vray are closer to each other as it seems for the first look.
in my feelin, and geddart and me did some testings, the main difference is, that brazil from its core is more configurated to produce stunning highendimmages right from the scratch. means, you can produce very impressive immages right from its standart configuration for the cost of high rendertimes.
surface of the programm at last seemd a bit more handy than vray right now., but
vray seems to be more configurated for the nearly as high quality , but much much faster , and now with the new betas still faster as fast for a bit less immage quality.
now !!! we tweeked vray to produce as detailed shadow qualities in vray as in brazil of course for the cost of rendertime. at last comparable quality took nearly the same time in vray as in brazil. on the other hand, brazil wasnt as easy to tweek to more speed as vray was.
and also, in the same time you get much more preview immages in vray, while in brazil you usualy still wait for the first render.
also we are not brazil pros, so a good brazil user maybe would tell us other things.
what i miss in brazil is a way for very very fast flickerfree gi solutions in scenes where only the camera is animated. this is a very big point to vray. but lets wait for the 2.0 . but you know lets see what vlado and peter did do untill then .
the faster vray aproach seems to melt away, when it comes to high animated senes, where only single frame animations are needed. here brazil comes close to vray i think because many of the optimazations of vray deal whith those “only camera animated” situations.
so the race still is interisting with a smal advantage to vray.
my opinion
Tom