I put a Background Plate node before my Karma Render Settings node, no holdouts. The background plate appears in the viewport but not in renders. A assume it's supposed to? Is there any way to make this work?
You need the geometry to project the background plate onto. Add a grid below your cube and set the background plate LOP's "primitives" parameter to point to the grid.
Hi. The background LOP assumes that the elements will be rendered separately and tweaked/composited in comp, hence why the slapcomp only happens in IPR for previewing. But if you wish to render out what you see in the viewport you can certainly do so: place "Render Settings Edit" node after "karmarendersettings" LOP, under Karma->Global->Image, change "Use Background" property to "On"