
Cons: doesn't do physically accurate rendering very well compared to Vray or Arnold. Good to use for quick and dirty mockups of scenes. Render Engine, Material Type, and Lighting form a system that you need to have knowledge of to get good results. While some renderers support multiple types of materials and lights, no renderer supports all types of lights and materials.

You can't just click "render" with any random type of material assigned to objects in your scene and any type of light. You will learn that rendering is a very big subject and each Renderer has optimal material types and types of lights that need to be used with it. Then progress through the other renderers in the same way. I suggest you start by learning the scanline renderer, Do a google search for 3ds max scanline render tutorials and follow several different ones. I'll give you my personal opinion on each for what its worth, but since you are a student you should try each so you learn first hand. Each renderer has its strengths and weaknesses and there is always a trade-off between speed and quality. Did you try applying a vray material to a box and add a vray light to the scene and then render with vray Next? Does it render? Similarly, if you assign a standard material to a box and render with the scanline does it render? What do you mean nothing changes? Do you mean that the material editor is still showing black squares? If you switch to ART or Arnold with a vray material in the material editor assigned to an object in the scene you should get error messages indicating that the vray material is not supported. F i choose v-ray next or v-ray gpu, nothing changes.
