This is really funny, Paul, and I agree the best is the Vue render with normal map in the bump channel. C4D blurs too much texture maps by default, so it always looks too smooth, unless you go negative in the blur scale.
But what is strange is that Vue can create  bump out of a normal map that onlyu has rgb information, where it expects a greyscale in this cahnnel. And a normal map converted to greyscale doesn't mean anything...
So the question remains: can Vue read normal maps?
How does it look when you get closer?