A lot of aspects of RenderMan for Blender (RfB) such as defaults and labels can be customized using JSON (.json files).

Environment Variables

Environment variables can be set using an rfb_envvars.json file. This file is automatically read on start up from the user's config directory (see: Blender's documentation). Note, this method cannot be used to set any standard Blender environment variables, including OCIO.

An example of the format of the file:

{
    "$schema": "./schemas/rfbEnvVarsSchema.json",
    "environment": {
        "RFB_LOG_LEVEL": {
            "value": "INFO"
        },
        "RFB_SITE_PATH": {
            "value": "/path/to/rfb_config_files"
        }
    }

Advanced: if you would like RfB to ignore the rfb_envvars.json, set the environment variable RFB_IGNORE_ENVVARS_JSON to 1

Configuration Paths

To find configuration JSON files, RfB will check the following environment variables in order:

...

Finally, we can also add custom display channels that can be used in AOVs. Note, the name of this JSON file does matter; it must be named: rman_dspychan_definitions.json. Here's an example where we add a new channel called MyAOV.

{
    "$schema": "./schemas/rfbDspyChansSchema.json",
    "channels": {
        "MyAOV": {
            "description": "This a custom AOV",
            "channelType": "color",
            "channelSource": "MyAOV",
            "group": "Pixar"
        }        
    }
}

...