Hi Bowcat
Flipside, Natty and the others are right.
Just stay a while with vray, it´s worth it. And as said, there will be no way back after a while 
The forum isn´t the only nice thing with vray.
Well
Photonmapping in Brazil as with vray is an aproach to make renderings faster, only in interior scenes. Highendrenderers, using a backward raytracing algorithm, like both do, have problems, to view small areas of light, searching for the light amount at each sample point. For this, they have to trace lots and lots of rays, to get good statistical results. This problem apears most time in Architectural interior scenes, and the solution for this in Brazil as in Vray usualy was photonmapping.
But like said, it sometimes is a bit tricky to setup, and only works with vray materialals and with Vray lights.
But stay a while with vray. The new Vray version 1.5 will overcome those problems, giving a new aproach, to speed up rendertimes especialy in interiors.
This new method, called lightmap is as fast as photonmapping, but much much esier to setup, and secound it works with each and every way of lightdistribution, Backroundimages, Hdri, selfiluminated objects, standart lights, vraylights, and so on.
this together with imap for first bounce, and qmc will speed up everything.
another thing i dont know about Brazil, is if it can precalculate light like vray and irradiance maps.
This feature is one of the most straightforward things in vray. and After a while using vray you won´t anymore want to miss it.
at last me and Geddart who also works at lichtecht.de, tested some time ago brazil against vray. First vray semed to be 2 to three times faster than brazil for the cost of very fine and small gi details in smal areas. After tweeking vray we could come to the same results as brazil but had to wait the same time.
well i would like to here your thoughts of vray after you did use it a while. It is very interisting to judge vray from a brazil point of view after you have learned enough about vray.
so good luck with it and once again welcome to vray forum :lol:
Tom from Hamburg