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For a more in-depth discussion about instancing, please read the Instancing in RenderMan documentation.  It provides some great background information as well as some tips you should know about if you are instancing subdivision surfaces.

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Below are two examples for how to set up your Node Graph to produce instancing.  It shows that you can override certain attributes on each instance – in this case, the material – to give each instanced object a different look.

In this example, the green and the purple dragons are instances of the blue dragon.  The materials have been overridden at the instance level.  If you don't have a copy of the dragon, you can use any geometry you like.  Just change the path to the Alembic_In node.

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