Hi macray - maybe Rich will chime in with what solution works for him, because earlier in this thread he mentioned that using vertex normals (represented by the normals tag) worked for him going into Maxwell.

How exactly are you going into Maxwell, is there a plug-in that you're using? Maybe there are some settings on the plug-in that you have to enable to make normals be transferred.

... I just did some browsing of the help file for the maxwell C4D plugin here:
http://think.maxwellrender.com/docs/maxwellrender_cinema4d_plugin_manual.pdf

There is an "Ignore Normal tag" checkbox option in the "Maxwell Object Properties" dialog, so make sure that is not set on any object that you're transferring, and also it says:

   "Note that Normal tags will be ignored automatically if the object is not already triangulated; in that case, the normals contained in the tag will not be suitable for rendering the triangulated object and must
instead be regenerated from scratch."

So that would seem to be your problem - try exporting out from MoI with "Output: Triangles only" in order to avoid this limitation of the Maxwell exporter that it ignores normal tags on quads or n-gons.

Once you do that you probably should not have to delete the normal tags or add a phong tag, and you will get the high quality normals used which will give you the best quality.

Also you may want to contact Maxwell support and ask that they remove this limitation in their plug-in that the Normal tag gets ignored unless your object is completely triangulated. Cinema4D's built in renderer is able to use normal tags on n-gons and it would be good if Maxwell's plug-in behaved in the same way and use the internal triangulation instead of actually requiring the entire base object to be triangulated.

- Michael