Hi,
I’ve had a good crack with Cycles for the last few months, but the Path Tracing algorithm just isn’t doing it for me with interior scenes, Photon Mapping is pretty essential for these. From what I’ve read it’s not on the cards for Cycles at the moment unless some bright spark writes some code for it.
I’ve just had another look at Yafaray, it’s been a while - after a bit of trouble trying to get it to work (my fault in the end) I’m looking for resourses.
The problem at the moment is that most of the docs are for old versions of Yafaray - there’s a lot of info there, pdfs etc, but the settings are quite different now with the beta release.
Additionally the tutorials/scene file leave a lot to be desired. Most of them are for older versions - I know you can convert them, with the convert from 2.4x button - but the results never look as good for some reason when rendered. Plus there aren’t many examples either that show interior scenes.
Anyone got any links, or info to share please?
Cheer, Jay 
After some professional vacation I want come back to YaR.
And agree - for complex scene without big (all wall) window YaR gives faster and clearer result.
So, I’m interesting in it too. And playing with new settings.
First - I was found, that area light gives clearer and faster result than bg portal. Sad but true…
I’ve chatted with a few guys in the Yafaray forums, but they basically said it’d be good to have some new tutorials, i.e. since blender 2.5+, especially for archviz. Sadly they could only point me to several posts in the forum which had WIPs and others in the post suggesting bump up this, add this light, no use this, add this etc etc.
It was also suggested that I read the PDF manuals, but these are really out of date, they explain how texhnically Yafaray works, but really don’t help in putting it all together, additionally a lot of terms are now different in the options panel - very confusing to me.
This was the reason why I gave up on Yafaray years ago, I ended up spending 90% of my time just trying to get the settings right, and as each scene would require different settings + the added render time, nah just not for me sadly. If someone comes up with some new tuts (archviz), then I’m very interested, but I think Yafaray has become a very small clicky tight community and just not enough users to add docs and tuts seems to me that most are waiting for Cycles to improve now
I actually signed up for Blender Cookies yesterday for the month to look at the Citizen Archviz tutorial, by Johnathan - It’s Cycles, and by no means a totally photo realistic render, but it’s on the way. Even after years of blender, I’ve still learnt a lot that I didn’t expect to, so pretty worth it anyhow.