Will,

Can you post a small pic of the bumps in maya versus those in Vue.  Perhaps if we see it, we can suggest some other improvements.  Here are some other things to check:

1. Render settings: are you using texture filtering, what are your texture AA setttings

2. Did you try inverting the bump depth - for example, if the depth is set to 0.5 try setting it to -0.5 and see if this makes a difference

3. I assume you are using Object Standard mapping for the bump map material - yes?