LawinDart, I have FinalRender Stage-1. It's great. Yes, it uses all the standard Max materials, including raytrace materials. It can also use it's own powerful shader system as well. It's got some really great lighting options, including object lights, cylinder lights, and it's own fast volumetric effects. It's also compatible with just about any plugin out there for Max. It also has a GREAT selection of G-Buffer output channels. If you're like me, you will LOVE having G-Buffer output seperation of every channel you can think of for tweaking in post. The only downside of FinalRender I've found is this: It's much slower than Brazil, Vray, or even MentalRay at rendering GI, particularly when high anti-aliasing settings are involved. I'm sure if I were an expert with the settings, I could tweak them perfectly, but so far I haven't been able to find a "middle ground" between speed and quality when it comes to GI in FR Stage-1. If you avoid GI, then FR Stage-1 can be very fast, but quality anti-aliasing is still slower than it should be. For animation, you can use some lower settings, and it comes out very well.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.