Puedo decirte las diferencias fundamentales entre el Vray basic y Vray advanced, sacadas de su propia página (puede que ya las sepas, pero por si acaso.
Features of the current oficial Vray build (1.45.70).
Note: features that are present only in the advanced versión of Vray are marked in blue.
geometry pipeline.
reliable handling of extremely large datasets (millions of unique Raytraced triangles) Even with limited memory resources.
Extensible with custom geometric primitives th rouge the Vray geometry SDK.
Includes VrayFur and Vray plane as additional geometric primitives.
Enhanced displacement mapping, Many times faster than the previous versión, includes view-dependent displacement mapping for fast high-quality results.
Eficient and fast Raytraced Motion Blur, Even with deforming and/or complex geometry such as Fur and displacement mapping.
native support for displacement mapping, includes analytic displacement mapping preserving all displacement details.
image sampling
Controllable full-scene antialiasing including antialiasing of texture maps and Raytraced effects (shadows, reflections etc).
Diferent image sampling methods, includes a fast high-quality adaptive antialiasing engine with support for all standard 3ds Max antialiasing filters.
Camera effects
Raytraced 3d Motion Blur;
Raytraced depth-of-field.
diferent Camera models, including Spherical and Fish-eye cameras.
lights and shadows.
Global illumination with support for image-based lighting, includes Photon and Irradiance Mapping.
Vray-specific área lights and shadows.
allows the saving of direct illumination into the global lighting solutions provided by the Photon and Irradiance Maps.
materials.
Vray-specific material with support for Glossy reflections, refractions, sub-surface Scattering.
Vray-specific RayTrace map for adding simple reflection and refraction effects todo non-Vray materiales.
Raytracing.
Highly optimized unified Quasi-Montecarlo sampling framework for fast rendering of múltiple combined blur effects (Glossy reflections/refractions, depth-of-field, Motion Blur, área shadows etc).
distributed rendering.
allows the rendering of a Single Frame on múltiple machines.
global illumination.
a new fast iterative global illumination method with quik convergence for interior scenes (Lightmap).
additional Vray-specific materiales
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- several simplified materiales for faster rendering (Glass material, Diffuse material, Diffuse+fake Specular material).
Vray-specific virtual frame buffer.
- an enhanced frame buffer with Many additional options.
- works directly with the floating-point sample data provided by the renderer.
- allows rendering of very large output images directly todo disk for saving precious Ram resources.
floating license system.
- completely independent of the 3ds Max authorization system.
- support for floating licenses.
developer SDK.
- allows the implementation of Vray-specific material Shaders, geometric primitives and Camera types.
- supports embedding into other modelling and/or rendering applications.
[/indent][indent]others.
- Irradiance Map viewer for managing global illumination maps.
- utility for baking illumination into texture map for use in real-time applications.
- supports 3ds Max r3, r4, r5, r6.
- compatible with most of the widely used 3ds Max plugins.
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Es decir, es muy probable que las versiones free o demo no lleven todo lo que lleva la avanzada, aunque no lo sé seguro.