How to view custom attributes in the scene view.
Attribute visualization allows you to view custom attributes in the 3D view without having to rename them to match specific archetypes.
Visualizing color
Houdini lets you specify a point or vertex attribute to map to color in place of the standard color attribute.
Open the Display Options window by pressing D in the scene view.
Turn on the Override Color Attribute checkbox on the Geometry tab of the Display Options window.
Type the name of your attribute and choose an Attribute Map from the drop-down menu.
Note
You can also do this with the viewcolor hscript command in the viewport.
Custom display options
Custom display options are also available to control the visualization of specific attributes. They are available in all viewers, but can be enabled or disabled in individual viewports or on individual geometry objects.
Open the Display Options window by pressing D in the scene view.
On the Guides & Markers tab, click the drop-down arrow beside the Custom heading and choose one of the options to create.
A text option will display the value of the specified attribute in the viewport.
A vector option will display a vector stick in the direction of the specified attribute.
A generic option is intended to work with render hooks, created through the HDK. It passes an enable/disable value along with a single string argument to any render hook that looks for it.
The new toggle will appear under the Custom header. To edit the option, click 
and choose Edit.
Note
The Save As Default button on the Display Options window will also save a definition file of the existing custom options (display_options.def) and save the current state of each option to the display.pref file.
Any custom display option loaded from a hip file will replace any defaults with the same name.
The 
Display custom attributes button on the Display Options toolbar allows you to turn custom display options on and off.