Are you confused with Cinema node system or with CentiLeo node space in particular inside Cinema node system? CentiLeo nodes just copy the functionality of old-style menu materials and shaders. But the difference is with the node display with connections.
In old menu based materials the centileo materials should be outputed to the viewport with all textures by default as far as I remember. Maybe it's switched off by yourself in display settings of C4D viewport

Ha-ha! If you use node based materials then you need to connect any texture / node you like to the Viewport Color port of the Output material node. So this is organized this way just not to overload the viewport with textures and not to waste the memory resources. But if you need to see something you can make this connection.
Actually I haven't made this default texture output to the viewport only because we have it in IPR which shows the textures at full precision and in arbitrary resoultion and it's fast enough for working with UV editing.

CentiLeo has interactiv preview render mode (IPR) which allows to see what you edit for geometry, light sources, camera and materials. You don't need to render the animation upfront and then see results. With IPR you can see the ongoing work in real-time. Also CentiLeo material textures are displayed in the viewport as well, but in lower resolution.
The transparent could be not working because of IOR value, it refracts with IOR = 1.4 by default. However Alpha doesn't have IOR, it's the same as refraction with IOR = 1.
As for material converter then of course we need it so much

The transparency and alpha both work, you just need to toggle the checkbox enabling them in material settings. By default they are off. And also there is transmission weight for transparency. It works like multiplier. It's valuable when you use a lot of material channels

Luminance is Emission for CentiLeo. As for normal map CentiLeo has bitmap with "Is Normal Map" checkbox, select it (off by default) and connect it to the bump map slot of course

Vertex Map is a tag that stores the float values drawn by user on top of a surface. They can be accessed with centileo nodes. The screenshots from here may give an idea https://centileo.com/news/145/centileo-for-cinema4d-0610/ Of course we need to describe it in the manual more precisely

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ssjenforcer wrote: I also tried rendering a frame to confirm it wasn't working. And a rendered frame also had no Jiggle deformation

That's probably because you need to render frame by frame from beginning. Not a selected frame. But just use cached simulation, that works well and it's the only solution for deformation motion blur

CentiLeo reads colors of native Cinema material, but not textures. That's why you got it that way.
Vertex Map is used, to access the values of vertex map you should have it on your object and to get it as a texture you should use CentiLeo Vertex Map node. Up to 10 vertex maps are supported per object.

It looks like no too many options to cheat volumetric light inside a renderer. Maybe it can be done in a compositing tool such as After Effects, but I don't use it.

I have wathed at the scene you sent me. Thanks a lot! Actually CentiLeo currently needs to use own materials like CentiLeo Material. And it uses own textures like CentiLeo bitmap. To use inside material you should click the checker black&white button to the right side of material property (such as diffuse color) and create Centileo bitmap.
Same story with CentiLeo node space. Only own shaders are used.
As for native Cinema materials and textures in your scene we need to implement a material converter, which is a task for near future. I know it's needed and I have always postponed it )

ssjenforcer, I have detected the issue with Jiggle. So it doesn't work in our case in IPR because CentiLeo is doing asynchronous scene evaluation for IPR in a background thread. I have made it for a good reason: to improve the smoothness of modeling and interactive rendering with asynchronous loads. It deals with a scene copy and Cinema 4D has a bug there in some simulation cases. I can get rid of the issue on CentiLeo side if I replace the asynchronous scene evaluation with synchronous, and all the modeling edits will launch as expected but the GUI can have some interruptes in "Auto Scene Update" IPR mode during modeling.
To avoid the issues just in the existing version you can cache the simulation of Jiggle deformer. Just go to the Cache Tab and click "Calculate" there. It will compute all the coordinates for all frames upfront. And next after it these cached coordinates of resulting object will run smoothly with currenct CentiLeo approach.
Actually I was talking once with a simulation plugin developer and he recommended to always use simulation caching during rendering to avoid all sorts of issues, there could be some others too.

Auto Scene updates are off in the IPR in your screen shot. Also you may manualy update the scene for IPR. Click the buttone with bend arrows in IPR

If you send me a scene file with textures to info@centileo.com I could test and see what's going there with more confidence. An archive using Dropbox or Google Drive would be fine. Would that be ok?

Hi xblurp, as far as I can see on your images I can say CentiLeo doesn't recongnize Cinema native bitmap used inside CentiLeo material. So you should create a centileo bitmap itself and use it in the slots of centileo material. Same story for CentiLeo Node staff.

Also you may check this topic https://centileo.com/docs/index.php?COURSE_ID=3&LESSON_ID=57&LESSON_PATH=17.57 if you use assets from Cinema asset browser or if you want to redirect the texture file caches to one single folder.

Hi mrcd59, and welcome here! Volumetric lights are not yet supported, but this is in a roadmap!

This light source is probably reflected or refracted from the other surface. If you need to remove it from visibility through refraction then need to switch it off for transmission channel.
Also I plan to make significantly more advanced system for inclusion/exclusion of the light sources vs the objects.

Yes, volumetrics are needed, so we need to make them sooner
As for the roadmap for short term:
0.65) Accelerartion for scene compilation and rendering + documentation online
0.66) Hair and spline native support without polygons
0.67) Material converter initial project
0.68) More internal image post processing tools
0.69) More AOV/extra images output including masks, compositing tag and other relevant thigns
0.70) Connection with more of other 3rd party plugins that can be valuable for renderer in both 3ds Max and Cinema 4D

Seems to be this is not possible at the moment to do this way. But you probably can render the image in CentiLeo for selected view, then save it and later map it to the plane as a texture.

The volumetrics are not yet supported. I will try to accelerate development )

CentiLeo light sources (area/rectangle, spot, omni, infinite) require the centileo light tag to connect. The Sky Object requires centileo environment tag.