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If you want to see your RenderMan materials and lights in the Viewer, you will need to disable the Basic Material and Basic Lighting checkboxes in the Display menu.  If you do not disable these settings, you will get a render with a dome light and a gray diffuse material. It can also be useful to set the Selection setting to "outline" rather than "fill", to see the selected object material more easily. These settings can be saved as part of your layout for future use.

Limitations

There are currently some limitations on what can be rendered with the Viewer render delegate.  The following RenderMan features are not yet supported.

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