Ah that fixed it! It seems having the default texture be a random grey map changes the input type. Switched it to a flat normal and now it considers the input in the instance material to be a normal map
No, I don't think you can switch render modes in Maya. I believe it's OpenGL by default. The link you sent me for the drivers is opening an "Unauthorised download" page.
why an extra project? if someone wants to they could certainly do a model that replaces the default player model or something. that way brandon also has some rigging to do :D
By default the vray plane light is spread equally in all directions. You can narrow the beam by increasing the directional option above 0 (turn on preview to see the effect in the viewport)
The default is 1. If 0.8 looks correct, then I would suggest staying with that, unless you want to add that correction to your Substance so the multiply doesn't need to happen in shader.
OpenGL is set to default (physically_metallic_roughness) all the outputs seem to be correct as well. I can send my file if need be? I may be missing something completely obvious here.
This depends on how the algorithm interpreters the mesh, different algorithm, different results. Simple example: Unsubdivided mesh Catmull-Clark (N-Gons) - Cinema 4D Default Catmull-Clark