I can indeed eventually add materials to RhinoCycles that directly correspond to Brazil materials. @andy will let me know when I can start working on that.
I am not sure what you mean by view texture mapping. Is this texture mappings like WCS and WCS (Box) and Screen?
A good week ago I committed code that adds a new display mode to the drop-down list, Rendered with Cycles. This entry should be available even when Cycles isn’t the current renderer.
Clipping plane functionality needs to be added to Cycles for it to work in Rhino. This is on the todo list: RH-29665. There are plans to add that, the timeline for that isn’t known yet. Making Cycles rock solid and easy to use is the current goal.
I don’t think waiting on core support for clippingplane is such a good idea.
To me it makes a lot more sense if Rhino could clip the render mesh prior to sending it off to the render engine, that way all render engines could support clippingplanes. Or doesn’t that make sense?
I suppose a mesh-level clipping plane solution could be a good intermediate one, but in the end it may be not a good idea when shaders are used that do displacement too, since that might result in unexpected render results.
Personally I do think clipping render meshes may be a useful feature to have though.